Surface Tension: A Literary Evening
Wednesday, August 20, 2025 | 6:00 p.m. (Doors at 5:30 p.m.)
SFAC Main Gallery, 401 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94102
Free and open to the public
Join Service Tension curators Leila Weefur and Elena Gross alongside local poet Rae Liberto for an intimate reading of works exploring queer embodiment and desire, featuring selections from exhibition inspirations including Jenny Johnson's essay "Butch Blow Job."
Service Tension is a group exhibition exploring the complexity of queer sexuality and power dynamics. It is on view in the SFAC Main Gallery through August 23, 2025.
The Readers
Elena Gross is an independent writer and curator living in Oakland, CA. She received an MA in Visual & Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts in 2016, and her BA in Art History and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2012. She specializes in representations of identity in fine art, photography, and popular media. Elena was formerly the creator and co-host of the arts & visual culture podcast what are you looking at? published by Art Practical. Her research has been centered around conceptual and material abstractions of the body in the work of Black modern and contemporary artists. She has presented her writing and research at institutions and conferences across the U.S., including Nook Gallery, Southern Exposure, KADIST, Harvard College, YBCA, California College of the Arts, and the GLBT History Museum. Her most recent writing can be found in the publication Blood Sweat & Time: Emerging Perspectives on Mildred Howard and Adrian Burrell (Sming Sming Books). Elena is the co-editor, along with Julie R. Enszer, of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture (Rutgers University Press), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Awards for LGBTQ Anthologies. www.evgross.me
Rae Liberto is a queer poet and nurse living in the Bay Area. Their work has been featured in Sinister Wisdom, The Lavender Review, Foglifter Journal, and in Black Lawrence Press’ They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing.
Leila Weefur is a Liberian-American artist, writer, and curator whose work engages with film, architecture, and the archive to examine systems of belonging. Their research, across disciplines, explores environmental geographies, transnationalism, religion and queer worldmaking. Weefur has worked internationally with institutions including Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, ICASF, CCA’s Wattis Institute, SLASH Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the African Diaspora, and The Kitchen. Weefur was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2024 and completed a residency with the Bemis Center for the Arts. Weefur’s writing has been published in SEEN by BlackStar Productions, Sming Sming Books, Baest Journal, and more. Weefur is a lecturer at Stanford University and a member of curatorial film collective, The Black Aesthetic. www.leilaweefur.com
