Art Metropole

#16388

Gay Pompeii 79 A.D.

Writer

Legacy Russell

Date

2025

Publisher

GenderFail

Format

Artists' Books

Size

11 × 17.7 cm

Genre

Poetry, Queer Art & Artists

With her debut chapbook, award-winning author and curator Legacy Russell returns to poetry with her GAY POMPEII, a collection of lyric poems that begin at the end of the world. Rising out of Russell’s 2022-2023 Digital Fellowship for Pompeii Commitment.Archaeological Matters, the first long-term, contemporary art programme established by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, the author and curator explores ash, filth, dirt, and decay, intersectional with the fetishistic mythos of Pompeii and its destruction in 79 CE by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Pompeii today is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that receives over two million visitors per year to view its archeological excavation. Russell puts the mass voyeurism, sensation, extraction, and loss of Pompeii—a devastating moment frozen in time—to work. In GAY POMPEII, the site becomes a device with which Russell unspools birth, death, genocide, visual culture, and space-time. The title of this compilation underscores the essence and demand of capitalism: to be carefree in the face of looming extinction. Russell’s GAY POMPEII is a selfie taken at the edge of catastrophe and a polyphonic elegy.

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award, a 2022-23 Pompeii Commitment Digital Fellow, a 2023 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow, and a 2024-25 Lunder Institute for American Art Fellow. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. Her first book is Glitch Feminism (2020, Verso Books); her second book is BLACK MEME (2024, Verso Books).