“Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives & aesthetics”

Cooper Union (41 Cooper Square)

poster for “Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives & aesthetics”
[Image: Effy Beth "Una nueva artista necesita usar el baño (A new artist needs to use the bathroom)" 2011]

This event has ended.

Bring Your Own Body presents the work of transgender artists and archives, from the institutional and sexological to the personal and liminal. Taking its title from an unpublished manuscript by transgender pioneer Lynn Harris, the exhibit historicizes the sexological and cultural imaginary of transgender through a curatorial exploration of the Kinsey Archives and the burgeoning movements for transgender expression from the turn of the 20th century.

Simultaneously it presents contemporary transgender art and world making practices that contest existing archival narratives and construct new historical genealogies. 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.

The exhibition includes works by Niv Acosta, Mark Aguhar, Effy Beth, Justin Vivian Bond, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Vaginal Davis, Harry Dodge, Zackary Drucker, Chloe Dzubilo, Juliana Huxtable, Greer Lankton, Pierre Molinier, Genesis P. Orridge, Flawless Sabrina, Buzz Slutsky, and Chris Vargas and the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art.

Organized by Jeanne Vaccaro, a postdoctoral fellow in gender studies at Indiana University and a scholar at the Kinsey Institute, and Stamatina Gregory, associate dean of the School of Art at The Cooper Union, Bring Your Own Body is accompanied by a series of programs that focus on community activism and social justice, and which bring to light the important work of transgender artists lost to suicide and the AIDS crisis. Programs include the premiere of Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2015) about Stonewall veteran Marsha P. Johnson with directors Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel, and the filming of a live TV talk show by Niv Acosta.

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