Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art

Can be found here: www.motha.net

Queer California: Untold Stories 

April 13 – August 11, 2019

Oakland Museum of California

Work by artists and collaborators including Absolute Empress III Shirley, Chloe Aftel, Laura Aguilar, Tina Valentin Aguirre, D-L Alvarez, Steven Arnold, Gilbert Baker, Lisa Ben, Andrea Bowers, Kaucyila Brooke, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, Craig Calderwood, Pat Campano, Monica Canilao, Tammy Rae Carland, Cassils, Jerome Caja, Willy Chavarria, Kate Clark, Torreya Cummings, Amanda Curreri, Cyclona, Cecil Davis, Reed Erickson, Rhys Ernst, Edie Fake, Eve Fowler, William P. Gaddis Jr., Clay Geerdes, Rick Gerharter, James Gobel, Nicki Green, James Gruber, Barbara Hammer, Mick Hicks, William E. Jones, Lenn Keller, Joseph Richard Kapps, Young Joon Kwak, Vero Majano, DJ Brown Amy (Amy Martinez), Jaguar Mary, Helen Nestor, Yetunde Olagbaju, Kari Orvik, Frances Reid, Augie Robles, Peaches, Grace Rosario Perkins, Marlon Riggs, Nica Ross, Julio Salgado, Helen “Sanders” Sandoz, Jose Sarria, Patrick Staff, Chuck Stallard, Eric A. Stanley, A.L. Steiner, Elizabeth Stevens, Sylvester, Tina Takemoto, Xara Thustra, Wu Tsang, Chris E. Vargas/MOTHA, Lex Vaughn, Travis Y., and Cathy Zheutlin. 

Additional participants include L. Frank, Joseph Byron Jones, Miss Major, Toshio Meronek, Deborah A. Miranda, Donovan Nation, Kenny Ray Ramos, Kanyon Sayers-Roods, Kayla Strickland, and Karen Vigneault. 

Now on view at the New Museum "Consciousness Razing—The Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project.”

BETWEEN.

July 20 – October 14, 2018

Portland Art Museum

BETWEEN. highlights artists working within the queer and trans diaspora, and the unique voices coming from between or beyond the binary. This exhibition aims to queer the curatorial process, taking into account current visibility politics and presenting the work of LGBTQIA2S+ artists in ways that challenge normative art world conventions. Chris E. Vargas and The Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art (MOTHA) presents the fourth installment of his ongoing project Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects: Trans Video Store, a selection of contemporary short art films made by trans (or trans-adjacent) artists to examine a variety of ways trans stories and experiences have been represented on screen, both from outside and within their community. Accompanying these media works will be a visual art exhibition of work by artists selected through a dialogue-based research and sourcing process that touched a wide network of queer artists and writers with the intention to broaden curatorial authorship and directly serve the community whose historically significant cultural contributions have driven the arts and shaped contemporary thought. The exhibiting artists explore narratives of identity ranging from personal observation and portraiture to performative spaces of transformation and fantasy.  BETWEEN. aims to foreground narratives that exist within, around, under and/or in opposition to the patriarchal hierarchy present in art institutions.

Featuring artwork from Vaginal Davis, MOTHA, Zanele Muholi, Christina Quarles, Jordan Reznick, Jacolby Satterwhite,  and Vivek Shraya

Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects: Trans Video Store featuring:

FlyHole (Malic Amalya, 2017, 6 min.)

Phineas Slipped (Cary Cronenwett, 2002, 16 min.)

Golden Golden (Erica Cho, 2016, 14 min.)

la llamada (eduardo restrepo castaño, 2014, 15 min.)

She Gone Rogue (Zackary Drucker & Rhys Ernst, 2012, 23 min.)

Atlantic is a Sea of Bones (Reina Gossett, 2017, 7 min.)

SOL (Xena Ellison, 2017, 9 min.)

POOL DAY ACT 1 & 2 - Peppré Ann & Froends (Josef Kraska, 2017, 5 min.)

We’re proud to announce the third iteration of Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects, an ongoing series of exhibitions organized by Chris E. Vargas, Executive Director of the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art!

For this iteration Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects brings together art and archival material from University of Victoria’s world-renowned Transgender Archives to narrate an expansive and critical history of transgender communities.

Artists in the exhibition include: Cassils, Nan Goldin, Vivek Shraya, Aiyyana Maracle, Reed Erickson, Barbara Jean, Debbie Humphry, Del LaGrace Volcano, and more.

January 13 — March 29, 2018 

Legacy Art Gallery

Transvestism in the News is a collage of early and mid 20th century headlines gleaned from a scrapbook of the same name that was assembled by transgender activist and cultural figure Louise Lawrence (1912 - 1976). The scrapbook, along with others assembled by Lawrence, is housed at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in Bloomington, Indiana.

The 35” x 22.9" newsprint broadside was originally commissioned as a takeaway for the fall 2015 exhibition "Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics" at the Cooper Union gallery in New York City, organized by Jeanne Vaccaro with Stamatina Gregory.

April 15, 2017 | 11am – 1pm | Henry Art Gallery - Seattle, WA

In an ongoing response to the violence against women, and trans and queer people in Seattle and all over the world, BASE organizers (Building Autonomy & Safety for Everybody) advance a community-based strategy of self-defense and a belief that defending our bodies, livelihood, and communities is inherent to self-determination. Join us for a FREE workshop to learn how to do a knee strike and a palm strike, and how to use your voice to build power that can transform oppressive systems in our lives. BASE is a project that started as a collaboration between Banyan Queer Collective and API Chaya, and is now coordinated by a collective of queer and trans folks that are working toward liberation for people in Seattle and everywhere. Co-facilitators for this workshop are James Keum from BASE and micha cárdenas, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences and Interactive Media Design at the University of Washington Bothell, and exhibiting artist in the exhibition "MOTHA and Chris E. Vargas present: Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects." James Keum is a community advocate and facilitator, focusing on the self-determination of queer and trans people of color and young people in Seattle. Their involvement in BASE and the queer Korean-American community is to support healthy relationships and autonomous communities. micha cárdenas is the director of the Poetic Operations Collaborative, a design research lab at the University of Washington Bothell applying technological creativity to advance social justice. She is an artist/theorist who creates mobile media to reduce violence and increase health. This workshop is a part of cárdenas's #stronger series, which uses social media and speculative design to develop ways of promoting health and fitness for trans, two-spirit and gender non-conforming people, in order to make our communities safer and stronger. #stronger is a project of the Poetic Operations Collaborative.

Check out this fantastic article and project by Hugh Ryan (of the  Pop-Up Museum of Queer History) which features all-gender restroom signs designed by artists Al Benkin, Bishakh Som, LJ Roberts, Sybil Lamb, and MOTHA!

Print them out and use them to destigmatize your local bathroom!

We Asked Five Artists to Design All-Gender Restroom Signs -  VICE (April 7, 2017) 

by Jen Graves at The Stranger

MOTHA and Chris E. Vargas present: Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects  

August 13, 2016 — June 04, 2017 Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA

The second iteration of Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects, an ongoing series of exhibitions organized by Chris E. Vargas, Executive Director of the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art is now open.

Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects gathers archival materials and works by contemporary artists that narrate the history of transgender communities, the presentation at the Henry focuses on lives and experiences specific to Seattle and the greater Pacific Northwest.

PRESS RELEASE on SFMOMA’s Disembodied States blog series (April 27, 2016)

Look! MOTHA’s promo broadside poster image on the Archives and Archiving issue of the latest Trangender Studies Quarterly journal, edited by K. J. Rawson and Aaron Devor.

MOTHA is please to participate in the “Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics“ exhibition at the Glass Curtain gallery in Chicago. Swing by the space to pick up the latest MOTHA newsprint broadside poster and watch the accompanying video slideshow, both entitled “Transvestism in the News,” made especially for the exhibit.

“Transvestism in the News,” the poster and video, were made using early and mid 20th century headlines from a scrap book of the same name that was assembled by transgender activist and cultural figure Louise Lawrence. This scrapbook is housed at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University.

Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics

December 10, 2015 - February 13, 2016

Glass Curtain Gallery

1104 S Wabash Ave, first floor, Chicago, IL 60605

Bring Your Own Body presents the work of transgender artists and archives, from the institutional to the personal. Taking its title from an unpublished manuscript by intersex pioneer Lynn Harris, the exhibit historicizes the sexological and cultural imaginary of transgender through a curatorial exploration of historical collections, including the Kinsey Archives. Bring Your Own Body presents contemporary transgender art and world making practices that contest existing archival narratives in favor of 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.

Sexological and diagnostic histories of the clinic and the case study still reverberate in the foreclosure of transgender subjectivity. Bring Your Own Body interrogates the archive’s often violent capture of identity, mining the visual data of “transvestite” photography collected by Alfred Kinsey (1946—) and police records of transgender women of color imprisoned in the 1960s for sex work and female impersonation. Contemporary works animate the archive in their negotiation of inherited representations of transgender. Transgender is neither new nor finished, despite recent and unprecedented visibility in popular media. Bring Your Own Body presents a set of archival and aesthetic relations critical to our continued understanding of a richly textured transgender landscape.

Artists include: niv Acosta, Mark Aguhar, Effy Beth, Justin Vivian Bond, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Vaginal Davis, Zackary Drucker, Chloe Dzubilo, Reina Gossett & Sasha Wortzel, Juliana Huxtable, Greer Lankton, Amos Mac, Pierre Molinier, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Flawless Sabrina, Buzz Slutzky, and Chris Vargas and the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art.

Curated by: Jeanne Vaccaro and Stamatina Gregory