Event Archive
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DATE

DESCRIPTION

TITLE & LOCATION

Nov. 15,
2018

THE BROAD MUSEUM, Los Angeles 

CURATORIAL – EN CUTARO PATAS 
Latinx feminist performance art series

This edition of En Cuatro Patas (The Broad’s year long feminist Latinx performance series) features three performances taking place throughout the museum by Nao Bustamante, Gina Osterloh, and Dorian Wood. En Cuatro Patas continues the exploration of the politicized body, featuring feminist Latinx performance and media artists who ruminate on and fantasize alternative embodiments. The artists featured in this series dissolve boundaries between animal and human while exploring the transformational and pleasurable possibilities of the non-human figure. The series invites artists to take on the corporeality of the abject, the degraded, the non-human, the sub-human—the animal. En Cuatro Patas assumes other positions, realities and political imperatives that imagine a world otherwise. Through a series of four programs that include performance, film and video, artists from Los Angeles and Latin America will come together to mobilize the body through varied interventions.

Nov. 1,
2018

IN CONVERSATION 
– Richard Fung, M. Lamar, Tourmaline, Xandra Ibarra, Amber Jamilla Musser

Join us for a public conversation moderated by Amber Jamilla Musser with Richard Fung, M. Lamar, Tourmaline and Xandra Ibarra. Coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of José Esteban Muñoz’s critical text Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), this panel will consider the history and politics of representing race, sex, and the body. Rather than privileging explicit sex as the primary index of aesthetic or political radicality, we will analyze how explicit and implicit forms of racialized sexuality and gender can be understood as historically shifting. The work of these artists allows us to locate differences between explicit depictions of sex common in the 1980s and ’90s and the multiple ways of exhibiting bodies today. As the lines that distinguish between public and private are recast and new understandings of gender emerge, the exhibitionist tendencies of the past have both expanded and become more nuanced.

The New Museum, NYC

Oct. 11,
2018

THE BROAD MUSEUM, Los Angeles

CURATORIAL – EN CUATRO PATAS Latinx feminist performance art series

This edition of En Cuatro Patas (The Broad’s feminist Latinx performance series) features three performances taking place throughout the museum by Deborah Castillo, Oscar Alvarez, and Nadia Granados. En Cuatro Patas continues the exploration of the politicized body, featuring feminist Latinx performance and media artists who ruminate on and fantasize alternative embodiments. The artists featured in this series dissolve boundaries between animal and human while exploring the transformational and pleasurable possibilities of the non-human figure. The series invites artists to take on the corporeality of the abject, the degraded, the non-human, the sub-human—the animal. En Cuatro Patas assumes other positions, realities and political imperatives that imagine a world otherwise. Through a series of four programs that include performance, film and video, artists from Los Angeles and Latin America will come together to mobilize the body through varied interventions. For many of the artists, it will be their first time performing in Los Angeles. En Cuatro Patas will launch in January 2018 as part of the Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA organized by REDCAT and will continue throughout 2018.

Open Space 
(SFMOMA),
San Francisco

Fall 2018

OPEN SPACE FALL COLUMNIST IN RESIDENCE

Our Fall 2018 columnists in residence are artist, writer, and reproductive justice activist Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, journalist and educator Pendarvis Harshaw, and performance artist Xandra Ibarra. Over the next three months, they will publish on a rotating basis; what they choose to address, and how, is up to them. And once their official tenure is over, they will retain lifelong publishing rights, joining an ever-growing cohort of alumni columnists. So far as we know, this is a unique experiment among major art institutions. We’re very proud of this program, which was envisioned and built by our singular founding editor, Suzanne Stein, and we look forward to seeing where Tatiana, Pendarvis, and Xandra will take us. – Claudia La Rocco and Gordon Faylor.

July 29,
2018

Former site of Redz Bar, 2218 East 1st St, Los Angeles

DIRTY LOOKS ON LOCATION VIDEO SHOWCASE –  ALL THE FILMS OF XANDRA IBARRA* 

Queering the Southwest means remembering how Mexicans fleeing the revolution of 1910 and its violence created many Angelenxs with El Paso roots. Originally from El Paso, Xandra Ibarra’s work charges the connections between El Paso and Los Angeles, their borderlands and their histories of colonization through a feminist queer femme lens. Ibarra’s work will be show in Redz Bar, a lesbian bar that opened in the late 1950s and catered primarily to queer, working-class Chicanas.

Redz Bar closed its doors in 2015 after over 50 years. Ibarra’s work resonates with the history of Redz Bar by remembering the queer and colonial histories that brought Mexicans from El Paso to East L.A. throughout the 20th century. Ibarra’s films were curated by Raquel Gutierrez for Dirty Looks on Location in Los Angeles.

*All films except La Corrida and Untitled Fucking.

For more information visit: 
www.dirtylooksla.org

June 7-
28, 2018

SOMArts, San Francisco

GROUP EXHIBITION –  THE TURNING, QUEERLY: A History of Violence

History of Violence is the second part of a curatorial trilogy by Rudy Lemcke called The Turning, Queerly that includes: From Self to #Selfie (2017), A History of Violence (2018), and Precarious Lives (2019). The project reconsiders the notion of the self as self-with-others; explores the scene of violence and trauma as trigger and turning point; and proposes a rethinking of alliances and old models of political organizing that looks to reform the ideas of self and community. This exhibition explores the work of artists who have gazed deeply into the flame of violence, and reacted in ways that allow us a compelling look into queer existence.

These issues are tackled in the work of artist and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992). His film A Fire in My Belly was part of the acclaimed exhibition curated by Jonathan D. Katz, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (2010). Shortly after the opening of the exhibition, the film was censored and removed by political maneuvers of conservative religious leaders and right wing politicians. The film’s removal evoked an immediate response from the LGBT community, epitomizing an all too familiar attack on LGBT rights. Specifically, it represented an attack on our right to self-identity, the right to visibility, and ultimately the right to personhood that the Hide/Seek exhibition celebrated. This attack signaled to queers everywhere a revival in the culture war organized around an oppressive ideology that views homosexuality as a mental disorder at worst, and a sinful “lifestyle choice” at best.

For more information visit: 
qcc2.org/history-of-violence/

May 24, 2018

THE BROAD MUSEUM, Los Angeles

CURATORIAL –  EN CUATRO PATAS Latinx feminist performance art series

En Cuatro Patas continues the exploration of the politicized body, featuring feminist Latinx performance and media artists who ruminate on and fantasize alternative embodiments. The artists featured in this series dissolve boundaries between animal and human while exploring the transformational and pleasurable possibilities of the non-human figure. The series invites artists to take on the corporeality of the abject, the degraded, the non-human, the sub-human—the animal. En Cuatro Patas assumes other positions, realities and political imperatives that imagine a world otherwise. Through a series of four programs that include performance, film and video, artists from Los Angeles and Latin America will come together to mobilize the body through varied interventions. For many of the artists, it will be their first time performing in Los Angeles. En Cuatro Patas will launch in January 2018 as part of the Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA organized by REDCAT and will continue throughout 2018. 

April 27-29, 2018

Northwestern University

KEYNOTE

How do borders echo and reverberate as cultural geographies, unsettling space and forcing bodies to move, to organize, and to perform? How do performers and scholars account for and navigate their bordered existence, when traversing them can regularly (re)produce the conditions for both precarious and secure living? What conditions arise amongst bodies, boundaries, and the spaces there in between? The 2018 Department of Performance Studies Graduate Student Conference, In Motion: Performance and Unsettling Borders, invites  dialogue and debate around artistic work and interdisciplinary thinking.

For more information visit: 
sites.northwestern.edu/inmotion

March 21-22, 2018

UC Berkeley – California

PANEL/DISCUSSION

The Center for Race and Gender presents Invisible No More: A Symposium On Resisting Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color. The symposium convenes scholars, artists, survivors, organizers, and advocates living and working at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and criminalization to join us for a two day symposium examining and building on the themes, trends, and strategies explored in Andrea Ritchie’s recent book, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (Beacon Press, 2017). Placing stories of individual women—such as Sandra Bland, Kayla Moore, Charleena Lyles, Jessica Williams, Monica Jones, and Mya Hall—in the broader frame of the twin epidemics of police violence and mass incarceration, it documents the evolution of movements centering women’s experiences of policing and demands a radical rethinking of our visions of safety—and the means we devote to achieving it.

For more information visit: 
www.crg.berkeley.edu/events/invisible-no-more/

Feb. 23, 2018

COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION, L.A.

PANEL

In 2018, CAA will return to LA for its 106th Annual Conference. The four-day event will be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center from Wednesday, February 21 through Saturday, February 24. CAA’s Annual Conference consists of four days and over 300 presentations, panel discussions, workshops, special events, and exhibitions exploring the study, practice, and history of art and visual culture. As the best-attended international forum in the visual arts, the Annual Conference creates a community of practitioners, scholars, and the general public seeking to learn and connect. 

FEBRUARY 14, 2018

ODC, SF

LIMITED EDITION: OPEN SPACE

Join us for a performative exchange and discussion focused on humor in performance, tactility and the haptic with artists Cori Olinghouse, Tammy Rae Carland, Xandra Ibarra, and Anne Walsh, hosted by Claudia La Rocco, SFMOMA’s Head of Community Engagement, and Julie Potter, Director, ODC Theater.

An Open Space partnership with CounterPulse, The Lab, ODC Theater, Performance at SFMOMA, and Z Space, Limited Edition explores questions of legacy and lineage through performances, discussions, and gatherings at various locations throughout the city, with commissioned texts appearing regularly online.

For more information visit: 
openspace.sfmoma.org/limited-edition/

Feb. 8 – March 6, 2018

Swissnex Gallery

GROUP EXHIBITION

You had to be there is a group exhibition featuring Postcommodity, Thomas Hirschhorn, Xandra Ibarra, Ted purves & Susanne Cockrell, Katerina Seda, Cassie Thornton Jeremy Deller, Futurefarmers and Mark Tribe at the swissnex Gallery that playfully examines what remains beyond the completion of a public artwork or an action, and imagines various modes for experiencing projects in their aftermath. Through close collaboration with the artists and groups involved, the exhibition hopes to tell a story that diverges from the official lines read and promoted through art history. Through unconventional displays of firsthand accounts, reenactments and ephemera, You had to be there aims to tell a story that is not necessarily the story. 

You had to be there also questions the role of care and myth-making in the preservation of public works by exploring the legacy of such practices in San Francisco and Sierre, Switzerland. It will present educational initiatives; site-based projects, such as the Center for Land Use Interpretation; and Furk’Art, a little-known artist residency program that has been operating in relative isolation in the Swiss Alps since 1983. You had to be there is the first time archival documents, videos, and images from Furk’Art have been exhibited outside of Europe.

The exhibition is a product of a collaborative workshop between students from California College of the Arts Curatorial Practice Graduate Program in San Francisco and the Cantonal School of Art of Valais (ECAV) Masters of Arts in Public Spheres course in Sierre, Switzerland, under the auspices of the Creative Villages Project, which took place during the Fall of 2016. Scenography is designed by Anthony Guex and Camille Blin, who are faculty at ECAL/University of Art and Design, Lausanne, Switzerland. Graphic design by Jon Sueda, StripeSF.

The exhibition is curated by CCA Curatorial Practice students MK Meador, Amanda Nudelman and Rosa Tyhurst. 

Feb. 2 -24, 2018

GROUP EXHIBITION

“Pro Arts is pleased to announce somatic significations – a group exhibition, curated by Kara Q. Smith and featuring artists Sofía Cordova, Xandra Ibarra, and Yetunde Olagbaju. The three artists in somatic significations consider the transformative agency of subjectivity through their interdisciplinary practices. Sofía Cordova, Xandra Ibarra, and Yetunde Olagbaju reject, reconstruct, and recover narratives of identity using a wide range of media. Connecting their complex creative processes is an underlying emphasis on performativity. Performance enables the artists to traverse between the internal (personal) and external (environment) to generate new translations of past, present, and future. Works included in this exhibition engage and transcend the corporeal to underscore themes of ritual, identity, and visibility. Taken together they bring forth radical and vulnerable understandings of self, time, and place at a moment when new agency and significations are desperately needed to reconcile a landscape of turmoil and inequity.”

— Kara Q. Smith, curator

Pro Arts Gallery

Jan. 25-26, 2018

University of Texas, Austin

A Symposium to Celebrate The New LGBTQ Studies Program at UT Austin 

To celebrate the launch of LGBTQ Studies at UT, the program will host a symposium January 25 & 26, 2018 in CLA 1.302B. The symposium’s theme is “Queer Camaraderie” and will feature presentations and performances by Rod Ferguson & Lyndon Gill; Ernesto Martínez & Julie Minich; Josh Guzman & Chad Bennett; Xandra Ibarra (La Chica Boom) & Laura Gutiérrez; and Kim TallBear and Ann Cvetkovich. Symposium begins Thursday Jan 25, 6pm-9pm, and continues Jan 26 from 9am-6pm.

Jan. 20, 2018

THE BROAD MUSEUM, Los Angeles

CURATORIAL – Opening of EN CUATRO PATAS performance art series: Naomi Rincon Gallardo’s “The Formaldahyde Trip”

En Cuatro Patas continues the exploration of the politicized body, featuring feminist Latinx performance and media artists who ruminate on and fantasize alternative embodiments. The artists featured in this series dissolve boundaries between animal and human while exploring the transformational and pleasurable possibilities of the non-human figure. The series invites artists to take on the corporeality of the abject, the degraded, the non-human, the sub-human—the animal. En Cuatro Patas assumes other positions, realities and political imperatives that imagine a world otherwise. Through a series of four programs that include performance, film and video, artists from Los Angeles and Latin America will come together to mobilize the body through varied interventions. For many of the artists, it will be their first time performing in Los Angeles. En Cuatro Patas will launch in January 2018 as part of the Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA organized by REDCAT and will continue throughout 2018.

Written and directed by Mexico City artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo, The Formaldehyde Trip is a cycle of songs and videos dedicated to murdered Mixtec activist Alberta “Bety” Cariño, performed live with crafty and ornate props, and echoes from Mexican B-side Sci-Fi films of the 60s and 70s. The Formaldehyde Trip weaves together Mesoamerican cosmologies, feminist activism and theory and indigenous women’s struggle for their bodies and their territories. The work imagines Bety Cariño’s journey through the underworld where she encounters women warriors, witches and widows, the dual-gendered goddess of death and animals preparing her rebirth party. An axolotl (Mexican salamander) in formaldehyde is the story-teller who agitates between fact, fiction and friction.

Jan. 18, 2018

The Mayan Theater, Los Angeles

PERFORMANCE/VIDEO

LA-based performers Rubén Martínez and Raquel Gutiérrez host VARIEDADES, an interdisciplinary performance that brings together music, spoken word, theater, comedy and the visual arts, loosely based on the Mexican vaudeville shows of early 20th century Los Angeles where Martínez’s grandparents performed in a musical duo—approaching history in an interdisciplinary fashion, with song and comedy and performance art, with political and intellectual and aesthetic depth. The evening, produced and curated by Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, features performances by Alice Bag, Nao Bustamante with Dynasty Handbag and Karen Tongson, Rafa Esparza, Selene Luna, Cheech and Natasha Marin, & Dorian Wood. 

For more information visit: 
www.redcat.org/festival/variedades

Jan. 12-14, 2018

UNTITLED Art Fair, SF, Palace of Fine Arts

GROUP EXHIBITION 

SOMArts will present a multidisciplinary showcase of performers and artists at UNTITLED, San Francisco. Reaching into the vault of performances that have been incubated at SOMArts, we’ll ask some of the Bay Area’s most innovative performance artists to explore queer futures beyond the anthropocene. A hub for experimental and socially conscious art in the Bay Area for over 35 years, SOMArts is thrilled to partner with UNTITLED to bring the cutting-edge of queer performance and visual art to the Palace of Fine Arts.

Jan. 12-14, 2018

SCREENING AT MIAMI ART BASEL

Curated by Anthony Spinello and Zoe Lukov, this all-women non-commercial contemporary art fair that aims to give a voice to female artists and break down gender inequality. Artists include Guerilla Girls, Yoko Ono, Liza Cowan, Micol Hebron and Jillian Meyer. Includes Fair Play, The Femmes’ Video Art Festival, and Fair Trade, major public installations and performances. 

Brickell City Center

For more information visit: 
www.fairmarket.art