Visiting Artists Program: Current Lectures

Engaging various genres since the late 1970s, Vaginal Davis has stretched the boundaries of performance art, music, writing, and videography throughout her career. This gender-queer, art-music icon made her first appearances in Los Angeles's club scene. She has since traveled internationally critiquing conventional and alternative mores as well as gallery-centric art through various presentations and concept bands such as Cholita! The Female Menudo and the Afro Sisters. She champions terrorist drag, a performance aesthetic brusquely interrupting the cultural assimilation of commercial or mainstream drag characteristics. As an extension of this genre, Davis has produced low-cost, high-impact 'zines and race and gender confusing happenings, like her 2007 drag reconstruction of Vanessa Beecroft's Navy SEALs work.

Davis has shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva; and Hebbel Am Uffer, Berlin, as well as festivals including Pacific Standard Time, Los Angeles; Berlin International Film Festival; and Antony Hegarty's Meltdown Festival, London.

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