HEADMASTER NO. 9
THE COLLABORATION ISSUE
Headmaster is the "art magazine for man-lovers". The magazine's editors write assignments for artists who then create original projects for each issue. Headmaster No. 9 – The Collaboration Issue – features projects by seven artist duos, one musical duo, two writer/translators, and one drag house (House of Rice, Vancouver’s only all-Asian drag collective). Included in the issue are brothers, couples, friends, and duos whose relationships are more ambiguous. Headmaster No. 9 also includes a special 16 page bilingual zine insert and a risograph poster by Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin!
HEADMASTER NO. 9 FEATURES ORIGINAL PROJECTS BY:
CHUCK & GEORGE
ALEJANDRO CÓRDOVA & LAWRENCE SCHIMEL
FADO BICHA
KRIS HARZINSKI & WILL HAUGHERY
HOUSE OF RICE
JON & JARRETT KEY
LOS PICOLETOS
MILLER & SHELLABARGER
FLORIAN & MICHAEL QUISTREBERT
NICK VAUGHAN & JAKE MARGOLIN
Headmaster No. 9 was supported by:
The City of Providence
Department of Art, Culture + Tourism
H E A D M A S T E R NO. 9 / C O N T R I B U T O R S
FADO BICHA
ASSIGNMENT: FADO / THE STORY OF HEADMASTER, CHAPTER 9
Listen to a sample of the EP below. To listen to the entire EP, click here and enter the code found inside Issue No. 9. Don’t have an Issue No. 9? Then purchase a copy here!
Fado Bicha is a musical and activist project created and developed by Lila Fadista, voice and lyrics, and João Caçador, instruments and arrangements. They subvert the heteronormativity and gender barriers of traditional Fado, claiming the right to a heritage that is also theirs. For Headmaster No. 9 they produced a nine-movement EP extending the serial Story of Headmaster, looking at the relationship between the Headmaster character and his long-lost lover Oscar.
KRIS HARZINSKI +
WILL HAUGHERY
ASSIGNMENT: SYNÆSTHESIA
VIEW KRIS & WILL’S VIDEOS HERE
By literally surrendering inherent differences, Kris Harzinski & Will Haughery spontaneously experiment with power and compliance, upending the notion of bromance and other normative constructs. Will is a furniture designer for his company East Otis Studio and maintains a painting practice in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Kris collects hand-drawn maps for the Hand Drawn Map Association, an archive he founded in 2008, and creates LGBTQ+ zines and ephemera through his project Daily Life Storage. Headmaster previously worked with Kris and Will while programming the video installation AV Club during the 2015 edition of PVDFest; for Headmaster No. 9 the artists produced a series of videos about synaesthesia.
KRIS HARZINSKI: WEBSITE / INSTA
WILL HAUGHERY: WEBSITE / INSTA
JON + JARRETT KEY
ASSIGNMENT: GRAFTING
READ JON & JARRETT’S INTERVIEW HERE
Jon & Jarrett Key are Queer Black fraternal twin brothers from rural Seale, Alabama. Jarrett is a multdisciplinary painter, sculptor, and installation artist while Jon is a writer, designer, and painter. Based in Brooklyn (Jon) and Providence (Jarrett), they maintain separate creative practices but worked together for their Headmaster project, collaged photographic works inspired by the horticultural concept of grafting.
JON KEY: WEBSITE / INSTA / TWITTER
JARRETT KEY: WEBSITE / INSTA / TWITTER
HOUSE OF RICE
ASSIGNMENT: ASTROLOGY
The House of Rice, founded by Shay Dior, is a Vancouver drag family composed of queer Asian artists who are hungry to showcase the beauty, talent, and strength in being a QTPOC individual. With Asian cultures and societies being traditionally homophobic, the House of Rice aims to provide inspiration for other queer Asian youth to feel safe in exploring their identities. The members of the House of Rice come from diverse educational, artistic, and most importantly, cultural backgrounds, but are united by their shared goal of creating visibility and representing the Queer Asian community. For their Headmaster project they created an entire zodiac system, personifying the goddesses and goddexes representing each sign.
HOUSE OF RICE: INSTA
ALEJANDRO CÓRDOVA +
LAWRENCE SCHIMEL
ASSIGNMENT: TRANSLATION
Alejandro Córdova (b. 1993) is a Salvadoran producer, playwright, and actor living in Buenos Aires. He is the recipient of the sixth Carátula Central American Short Story Prize, and is the first Salvadoran writer to win the award. Lawrence Schimel is an American writer and translator who has lived in Madrid for over twenty years. He writes both in Spanish and English and has published over 120 books as author or anthologist, for readers of all ages. For Headmaster No. 9, Schimel and Córdova gave one another prompts and each wrote three stories, then translating them between English and Spanish for each other. Their project appears in the issue as a special 16 page zine.
NICK VAUGHAN +
JAKE MARGOLIN
ASSIGNMENT: BOSTON MARRIAGE
Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin are a collaborative duo based in Houston, Texas. They are currently creating an ongoing series of fifty installations made in response to little-known pre-Stonewall queer histories from each state. This multi-decade endeavor draws from recent groundbreaking academic work, the artists’ own archival research, and significant time spent learning from and collaborating with local LGBTQ community members. The pair were living in Massachusetts during the time spent working on their Headmaster No. 9 project, and they produced a project about Boston marriages inspired by the lost 1895 novel Norma Trist; or Pure Carbon.
LOS PICOLETOS
ASSIGNMENT: DITHYRAMBS
Los picoletos are Fabro Tranchida and Dante Litvak, Argentine artists living and working in Bilbao, Spain. Their work focuses on youth underground movements including punk, hip hop, queer organizations, and skater culture. In their work they resort to photography, drawing, the construction of specific objects, and performance. For their Headmaster No. 9 project, the duo created a narrative inspired by Kilink, an Italian photonovel from the 1960s that had a long afterlife among fans in Latin America.
CHUCK + GEORGE
ASSIGNMENT: SECRET SOCIETIES
Chuck & George are the Dallas-based duo comprised of Brian K. Jones and Brian K. Scott, partners who have worked together since 1990. They have exhibited together for decades, and in 2019 the Galveston Arts Center hosted their highly-regarded 2019 exhibition Cat Butt Parfait: Chuck & George Explore the Ecosystem of Domestic Feline Digestion. For Headmaster No. 9, Chuck & George studied the concept of secret societies, developing three-dimensional sculptural artifacts from their own imaginary secret society.
MILLER + SHELLABARGER
ASSIGNMENT: TUG OF WAR
Miller & Shellabarger are Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger, married Chicago-based artists who work together but also maintain separate studio practices. They explore physicality, duality, time and romantic ideal in their multidisciplinary works – performance, photography, artists books, sculpture and cut paper silhouettes – that document the rhythms of human relationships, speaking both to common experiences of intimacy as well as the specifics of queer identities. For Headmaster No. 9 they produced a cut paper carousel book inspired by the concept of a tug of war.
FLORIAN + MICHAEL
QUISTREBERT
ASSIGNMENT: MYCOLOGY
Florian & Michael Quistrebert (born in 1982 and 1976 in France) live and work in The Hague (Florian) and Nantes (Michael). The brothers combine video and painting in a practice in which they explore the effects of light and shade, while bringing forward ideas of fascination, manipulation of the gaze, and their relationship to hypnosis, ecstasy and trance states. Taking elements that naturally attract our eye – fluorescent colors, sparkles, shiny and iridescent surfaces, LED lights – contrasted with content that is subtle and abstract. For Headmaster No. 9 the pair studied mycology and the fungal world.