Art historian, and curator. Art historically, I emphasize on contemporary art (1945 to present), but I am capable of teaching modern. I have a strong background in queer and feminist theory. I taught at UCLA and Otis College of Art and Design and the New School. Currently, I have created the nonprofit Queer Art Network: http//queerartnetwork.com Supervisors: Donald Preziosi, Amelia Jones, and Louise Hitchcock Phone: 343 594 7776 Address: 456 Elm Ave, Long Beach, CA, 90802
Critically Queer Review of Ruben Esparza's (and other curators) Queer Biennial: What if Utopia. ... more Critically Queer Review of Ruben Esparza's (and other curators) Queer Biennial: What if Utopia. This is the unedited version -- the art magazine editied the more pointed and salient points, but one must often compramise.
It is the summer of 2004, I am walking down Wilshire Boulevard to the Wilshire Westlake Building,... more It is the summer of 2004, I am walking down Wilshire Boulevard to the Wilshire Westlake Building, which was the location of Vaginal Davis’s newest studio, a stone’s throw from her previous one in Koreatown, and the last one she would have in Los Angeles (LA). In 2005 she would be leaving for Berlin. Davis, who grew up in LA and remains connected there, proclaimed during a 2012 performance, “My pussy is still in Los Angeles (I only live in Berlin)”: “My pussy resides permanently in Los Angeles, where it first emerged a millennium ago from the primordial ooze of the La Brea Tar Pits.”1 Throughout this performance Davis drew on marginal histories in LA, including feminist art movements from LA to Fresno, California. Her per- formance was no doubt an archival one, in the form of a nonlinear, fragmented, oral history-telling.2 At the performance, all attendees received an eight-by-ten-inch box containing the performative text of her act, “visualities,” and letters.3 These boxes- cum-archives, wrapped in hand-dyed fabrics, are simultaneously singularities and multiples. Her “body/self” meshes with her archives, and vice versa, in no small way she embodies aspects of Diana Taylor’s theory of the body, the archive, the reper- toire.4 As I show here, there is a queer archival impulse to Davis’s studios, performa- tive arts, and body/self—all the while revealing that queer art and archives produce counterknowledges and histories, which are nonenlightenment based over what was the “true,” “real,” and linear event/s; a strand of queer performativity refuses tradi- tional systems of knowledge-production binary operations, and chronology.
Vaginal Davis is a former Los Angeles–based visual and performance artist who now lives and crea... more Vaginal Davis is a former Los Angeles–based visual and performance artist who now lives and creates art in Berlin. Scholarly research on her work began to appear in the late nineties and has focused solely on her live, queer, performance art. But research on her queer archives (her studio-archives and her body/self as performing the archive) is missing, which is ironic, given that all her performances come from her various self-fabricated archives. Thus the author argues, among related ideas, that Davis is also a queer archivist—whose primary queer praxis is, in her words, “the indefinite nature of my own whimsy.” The author shows that Davis’s performances and musical bands are the deployment of her body/self as an archive from which she creates, fabricates, and recycles images and minoritarian and subcultural oral histories to make other kinds of archives—ones that are different, and queerly so.
Through an anecdotal story about Vaginal Davis and Andy Warhol, Davis highlight, through humor an... more Through an anecdotal story about Vaginal Davis and Andy Warhol, Davis highlight, through humor and irony, the racism, sexism, and other exclusions conducted by art history. In this way, I argue, she shows another way of doing art history
Critically Queer Review of Ruben Esparza's (and other curators) Queer Biennial: What if Utopia. ... more Critically Queer Review of Ruben Esparza's (and other curators) Queer Biennial: What if Utopia. This is the unedited version -- the art magazine editied the more pointed and salient points, but one must often compramise.
It is the summer of 2004, I am walking down Wilshire Boulevard to the Wilshire Westlake Building,... more It is the summer of 2004, I am walking down Wilshire Boulevard to the Wilshire Westlake Building, which was the location of Vaginal Davis’s newest studio, a stone’s throw from her previous one in Koreatown, and the last one she would have in Los Angeles (LA). In 2005 she would be leaving for Berlin. Davis, who grew up in LA and remains connected there, proclaimed during a 2012 performance, “My pussy is still in Los Angeles (I only live in Berlin)”: “My pussy resides permanently in Los Angeles, where it first emerged a millennium ago from the primordial ooze of the La Brea Tar Pits.”1 Throughout this performance Davis drew on marginal histories in LA, including feminist art movements from LA to Fresno, California. Her per- formance was no doubt an archival one, in the form of a nonlinear, fragmented, oral history-telling.2 At the performance, all attendees received an eight-by-ten-inch box containing the performative text of her act, “visualities,” and letters.3 These boxes- cum-archives, wrapped in hand-dyed fabrics, are simultaneously singularities and multiples. Her “body/self” meshes with her archives, and vice versa, in no small way she embodies aspects of Diana Taylor’s theory of the body, the archive, the reper- toire.4 As I show here, there is a queer archival impulse to Davis’s studios, performa- tive arts, and body/self—all the while revealing that queer art and archives produce counterknowledges and histories, which are nonenlightenment based over what was the “true,” “real,” and linear event/s; a strand of queer performativity refuses tradi- tional systems of knowledge-production binary operations, and chronology.
Vaginal Davis is a former Los Angeles–based visual and performance artist who now lives and crea... more Vaginal Davis is a former Los Angeles–based visual and performance artist who now lives and creates art in Berlin. Scholarly research on her work began to appear in the late nineties and has focused solely on her live, queer, performance art. But research on her queer archives (her studio-archives and her body/self as performing the archive) is missing, which is ironic, given that all her performances come from her various self-fabricated archives. Thus the author argues, among related ideas, that Davis is also a queer archivist—whose primary queer praxis is, in her words, “the indefinite nature of my own whimsy.” The author shows that Davis’s performances and musical bands are the deployment of her body/self as an archive from which she creates, fabricates, and recycles images and minoritarian and subcultural oral histories to make other kinds of archives—ones that are different, and queerly so.
Through an anecdotal story about Vaginal Davis and Andy Warhol, Davis highlight, through humor an... more Through an anecdotal story about Vaginal Davis and Andy Warhol, Davis highlight, through humor and irony, the racism, sexism, and other exclusions conducted by art history. In this way, I argue, she shows another way of doing art history
Queer Artists of Color in New York During the AIDS Epidemic
When AIDS was spreading throughout ... more Queer Artists of Color in New York During the AIDS Epidemic
When AIDS was spreading throughout New York – as too elsewhere – it impacted the artistic community in devastating ways, but in these dark times other artists and art, which were often blatantly political, emerged. As of late, given the various anniversaries of the AIDS epidemic and the commencement of ACT-UP and other aesthetic-political movements, several books and art exhibitions, such as Art AIDS America (2015), emerged. But, what was lacking—if not elided—was the role of women, LGBT, and queer artists of color and/or artwork that represented the lives and politics of said artists. Even though NY has been overly written about with regards to AIDS, HIV, art and/as activism—there has been little work done on women, LGBT, and queers of color during the early days of AIDS in the, then, art capital of the world. Thus, it is important to look at art by literary, visual, performance, and activist women of color and artists of color. If the work of Jose Muñoz has taught us anything, it is that hegemonic AIDS and art literature and history have a lot to learn from other histories and lives—as well as art, broadly construed, by queer woman and artists of color. Thus, this panel will explore those so often elided in this field of research and theorization in order to open the field to a broader spectrum.
A critical review of Ruben Esparza's Queer Biennial, in which this is the third iteration. This ... more A critical review of Ruben Esparza's Queer Biennial, in which this is the third iteration. This was published in Artillery art magazine and on artillery.com -- but highly edited by the editor. Here is the unedited version: Art Review: Queer Biennial: What if Utopia?
Critically queer critique of the Queer Biennial in Los Angeles, this year subtitled, "What if Uto... more Critically queer critique of the Queer Biennial in Los Angeles, this year subtitled, "What if Utopia," which fails to even answer the question visually or via the art talk. Published in Artillery Magazine and on their online site: https://artillerymag.com/queer-biennial-what-if-utopia/
Talk given at CAA on the Alternative Visions panel, which I desire to turn into a publishable pap... more Talk given at CAA on the Alternative Visions panel, which I desire to turn into a publishable paper on toxic and tender masculinities.
What I desire to explore are queer, cis male artists who use photography to present other masculi... more What I desire to explore are queer, cis male artists who use photography to present other masculinities other identities—specifically tender masculinites as oposed to toxic masculinity. Thus, I discuss the work of Matt Lambert, Abel Azcona, Stiofan O'Ceallaigh, and Shikeith in order to unpack a theory of performed, alternative masculinities— what I call, tender masculinities—which counters the rise of Trumpism, toxic masculinity, and a more global return to “traditional” gender roles. I will be looking at how alternative sexual orientations, genders, and spaces and see how race plays out differently and similarly when tender masculinities are performed. This is important to explore and theorize in order to show how queer artists are activists who desire to highlight radical differences and other ways of being “masculine” – which is becoming increasingly important search out, nurture, and support in these uncertain times for other bodies—and also lives.
This panel offers a reevaluation and theoretical repositioning of lesbian and gay art history's t... more This panel offers a reevaluation and theoretical repositioning of lesbian and gay art history's theories, methodologies, and goals; examples of these can be culled from the papers in Whitney Davis's important 1994 anthology, Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History. Interestingly, Davis's anthology emerged when a decidedly queer theory was exploding across the humanities, critiquing not only heteronormativity and patriarchy but also lesbian and gay history and theories themselves. Yet, queer theory played a virtually nonexistent role in dominate art history. Thus, this panel will perform two things: 1) provide an overview of where queer art history is and what queer art-historical work is being done, and does, which have only recently emerged within the discipline from a more dominate lesbian and gay art history that has used queer as an umbrella term and not deployed it as a theoretical tool and/or methodology, 3) explore what the potentials art for a queer, ot queering, art history is and how it can opem up the field, and 2) show how the recent intersections of queer art history with feminism and/or anti-racist work have productively complicated queer art history. Both entail exploring if, and how, queer art history has altered, or opened, the discipline of art history and its corollaries, and what this may mean—as well as what work remains to be done.
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When AIDS was spreading throughout New York – as too elsewhere – it impacted the artistic community in devastating ways, but in these dark times other artists and art, which were often blatantly political, emerged.
As of late, given the various anniversaries of the AIDS epidemic and the commencement of ACT-UP and other aesthetic-political movements, several books and art exhibitions, such as Art AIDS America (2015), emerged. But, what was lacking—if not elided—was the role of women, LGBT, and queer artists of color and/or artwork that represented the lives and politics of said artists.
Even though NY has been overly written about with regards to AIDS, HIV, art and/as activism—there has been little work done on women, LGBT, and queers of color during the early days of AIDS in the, then, art capital of the world. Thus, it is important to look at art by literary, visual, performance, and activist women of color and artists of color. If the work of Jose Muñoz has taught us anything, it is that hegemonic AIDS and art literature and history have a lot to learn from other histories and lives—as well as art, broadly construed, by queer woman and artists of color. Thus, this panel will explore those so often elided in this field of research and theorization in order to open the field to a broader spectrum.
Published in Artillery Magazine and on their online site: https://artillerymag.com/queer-biennial-what-if-utopia/