COOPER UNION SCHOOL OF ART, NEW YORK
GLASS CURTAIN GALLERY, CHICAGO
CANTOR FITZGERALD GALLERY, PHILADELPHIA
Bring Your Own Body, co-organized with Stamatina Gregory, presents the work of transgender artists and archives, from the institutional to the personal. Taking its title from an unpublished manuscript by intersex pioneer Lynn Harris, the exhibit historicizes the sexological and cultural imaginary of transgender through a curatorial exploration of the Kinsey Archives. Simultaneously it presents contemporary transgender art and world making practices that contest existing archival narratives and construct new historical genealogies. While the exhibition gathers work under an expanded umbrella of transgender, it does so without identitarian claims. Moving beyond the aesthetically defunct category of “identity politics” and the fraught gains of visibility, the artworks propose transgender as a set of aesthetics made manifest through multiple forms: paint, sculpture, textiles, film, digital collage, and performance.
Artists: Niv Acosta, Mark Aguhar, Math Bass, Effy Beth, Justin Vivian Bond, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Vaginal Davis, Zackary Drucker, Chloe Dzubilo, Juliana Huxtable, Greer Lankton, Pierre Molinier, Genesis P. Orridge, Flawless Sabrina, Buzz Slutzky, and Chris Vargas and the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art.
Public Programs
In DISCOTROPIC | Alien Talk Show (2015) niv Acosta seizes on an elementary medium of transgender exposure—television and the confessional culture of the talk show—to explore the relationships between science fiction, disco, astrophysics, and the black American experience.
The Queen (1968) follows a cross-country drag competition organized by Flawless Sabrina that concludes in the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant at Town Hall in 1967. Flawless speaks with Zackary Drucker and Diana Tourjee about The Queen and the collaborative process of cataloguing the Flawless Sabrina Archive.
Reading by Juliana Huxtable—poet, artist, and DJ. Juliana’s work explores the fragmented, mutating and mutable nature of identity, utilizing race, gender, and queerness as mediums to explore the possibilities of a post-identity politics. She uses a range of outlets to unpack these themes including self-portraiture, text, performance, nightlife, music, and poetry.
Salon: Printed Matter is a pop-up salon with Amos Mac, photographer, writer, and co-founder of Original Plumbing, and curator Jeanne Vaccaro. The BYOB library contains Transvestia (1960-1980) by pioneer Virginia Prince, ephemera belonging to The Transsexual Menace, and newsletters like The Society for the Second Self, all examples of transgender organizing and community formation in the pre-digital era.
TransEuphoria revisits the artistic legacy of Chloe Duzbilo (1960-2011) —downtown performer, activist, and singer in the rock band Transisters. As part of activist organizations like the Transsexual Menace Chloe directed one of the first federally funded HIV prevention programs for transgender sex workers in 1997. With Justin Vivian Bond, T De Long, Jeffrey Greene, and Buzz Slutzky; in partnership with Visual AIDS.
Happy Birthday, Marsha! is an experimental film about the legendary transgender artist and activist Marsha “Pay it No Mind” Johnson and her life in the hours before the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City. Directors Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel stage a performative lecture and screening.
catalog: why have there been no great transgender artists?
