Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I am a scholar and curator of contemporary art and public practice; in my work, I endeavor to recalibrate art history’s norms and canons. Working synthetically across oral history, public humanities, and writing, I explore the aesthetics of identity and engage the archives of sex/gender, race, and disability as unresolved and in ongoing formation. I’ve organized performances, commissions, symposia, and public programs with artists including Julie Tolentino, Tourmaline, Arthur Jafa, Xandra Ibarra, Paul Preciado, Renee Gladman, and Yve Laris Cohen.

My in process book, Handmade: feelings & textures of transgender, explores the felt labor of making identity, and was awarded the Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. I received my Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University under the mentorship of José Muñoz, and I am Assistant Professor of Transgender and Museum Studies at the University of Kansas.

While at Headlands

While at Headlands I will be writing a catalogue essay for Scientia Sexualis, an exhibition I am co-curating with Jennifer Doyle for the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. The writing thinks with artists whose work confronts, dissolves, and reimagines the scientific apparatus of sex and gender. Looking to the lab, the clinic, and the disciplines governing our sense of the sexual body, I am invested in speculative artistic technologies of transformation, embodied forms of knowledge, and radical practices of collective healing and care. The exhibition and the writing grounded in it hopes to open a space for readers to unlearn debilitating narratives about sex, hormones, sexuality, race, and ability. 

Artist portrait by by Amina Cruz.