Hair and Nails, the wonderful Minneapolis Gallery, is hard at work digitizing zine catalogues from their exhibitions. If you have never read one, or haven't read them all yet, check out their magazine for some now-online art reading featuring incredible layout and design by Kristin Van Loon. I am excited to share the link and nudge you towards some of the zines that feature my artwork and arts writing. 

#11: My solo show: "Laying in Wait" features essays about my work by: Leia Wambach, Christina Schmid, Sean Smuda, and Nicole Soukup

#21: Group show "Future Future" featuring a crew of great artists and essays by great writers!

#28: My first arts writing essay written about Kieran Myles-Andres Tverbakk, Kelley Meister and Lamia Abukhadra's work. 

#31: I wrote an essay about Rachel Youn's life-changing exhibition! 

Come one, come all, to the finale of our Jerker tour. We thought it fitting for a phone sex play to be concluded by a free live phone reading!
Join us on Saturday Feb 4th at 669-275-1807: 5pm PST, 6pm MST, 7pm CST, 8pm EST
Content Warning: graphic sexual description, kinky/BDSM scenarios, death, AIDS 
Access Notes: Email maxecrandall at gmail.com for text PDF.

Tuesday August 16th at 7pm we will be performing with guest narrator Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad at William Way LGBT Community Center. FREE tickets. 

Saturday August 20th 11pm-midnight we will be performing at Inferno in New York City with guest narrator Aldrin Valdez.  Ticket information coming soon. 

​Stay tuned for more information!  

​“Emmett Ramstad is a recipient of a 2022 McKnight Fellowship for Visual Artists, funded by The McKnight Foundation and administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.”

I am over the moon thrilled to have been selected as a 2022 McKnight Fellowship Artist alongside Ruthann Godollei, Pao Houa Her, Amanda Lovelee, Lamar Peterson, and Jonathan Thunder by visiting jurors Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, Associate Professor of Art History and Theory, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; Julio César Morales, artist and Curator of Visual Arts at Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe; and Katie Pfohl, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, New Orleans Museum of Art.

Don't miss the second midwest performance of Jerker at Quatrefoil Library! June 8th at 7pm, followed by discussion and reception in the library. 

Chicago performance at Leather Archives & Museum with guest Charles Ryan Long. Photo by Ivan Bujan

Artists Maxe Crandall and Emmett Ramstad present a semi-staged reading of Robert Chesley’s 1986 play Jerker, or The Helping Hand: A Pornographic Elegy with Redeeming Social Value and a Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in Twenty Phone Calls, Many of Them Dirty. Jerker tells the story of two strangers who develop an erotic fraternal relationship through phone sex. As the two characters get each other off, they demonstrate the power of sexual fantasy in processing the grief, rage, and loneliness of living in pandemic.

Inspired by their obsession with Robert Chesley’s archive at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco and supported by a Eureka Commission from Onassis USA, Ramstad and Crandall are at work on a performance installation focused on “corresponding intimacies,” a term they use to describe deep bonds people create through experimental relations. This event launches their national tour, which is organized to provide free performances at archives and queer/trans spaces while allowing them to conclude their research. 

This reading of Jerker is given courtesy of Victor Bumbalo of the Robert Chesley Foundation, Broadway Play Publishing Inc., and through funding from the Eureka Commission from Onassis Foundation USA. 

65 min semi-staged reading followed by 25 min discussion.

Content Warning: graphic sexual description, kinky/BDSM scenarios, death, AIDS 

I will be updating my blog with dates and information, but save the dates:
CHICAGO @ Leather Archives and Museum: Saturday June 4th, 7pm
MINNEAPOLIS @ Quatrefoil Library: Wednesday June 8th, 7pm
PHILLY and NYC: TBA- third week of August
SAN FRANCISCO: TBA- September or October?

I am honored to be asked to do a virtual studio visit with Second State Press! I used to be a FOB holder at SSP and it is great to be going back. I hope you can join! Here is the eventbrite link for the talk: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-studio-visit-with-emmett-ramstad-tickets-222214669057