MFA VS Visiting Artist Vaginal Davis' Performance, Class Visit and Studio Visits
September 10, 2018
We kicked off the Visiting Artist Lecture Series this year with a sparkly bang. Visiting Artist, Vaginal Davis, spent a whirl wind couple of days in Portland for the TBA Festival, to open an exhibition at Adams and Ollman Gallery and to spend time in the classroom as well as the studios with the Visual Studies students.
Davis’ performances are giddy, satirical stabs at the old-world order, levelling criticism at white privilege and the patriarchy with nuanced wit and game-show-style camp. The Vaginal Davis persona is a complex mixture of queercore punk antics and MGM studio glamour, reflecting Davis’ socially engaged and aesthetically consistent interests. —art21magazine
Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo—Black Screen Images and the (e)motive Notion of Freakiness is a lecture performance by Vaginal Davis, the internationally-revered, intersexed doyenne of intermedia arts and sciences. She takes public discourse to Dementia 13 levels as she spells out the queer and blatino experience in her own inimitable fashion, creating new words out of thin air and crashing, bull-in-a-Madame-Mau-china-shop style, over notions of propriety and reality. In short, her work can be described as disheveled, humorous, and rebellious.
The MFA in Visual Studies Visiting Artist Lecture Series brings artists, scholars, designers, curators, and critics from around the globe to engage with students and the wider community in a variety of formats, including lectures, conversations, panel discussions, group critiques, workshops, and studio visits. These visiting art practitioners contribute to, challenge, and expand the academic and artistic discourse at PNCA, extending the opportunities for instruction and learning.
