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Vaginal Davis: The White to be Angry

Exhibition

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A black-and-white image shows the artist, a dark-skinned transgender woman, holding a video camera on her shoulder.

Vaginal Davis as G.B. Jones in Beggars of Life segment of The White to be Angry, 1999


Photo by John AES Nihil of Aesthetic Nihilism Pictorial

Vaginal Davis is a key figure in the history of queer music, performance, and video art. Naming herself after the activist Angela Davis, she emerged in the queer and punk club performance scene of Los Angeles in the late 1970s. The artist created her own mythology during the live performances of her “multiracial, maxi-gendered” bands—an interplay between identity, fiction, and critique that also informs her influential xeroxed print publications, or zines, and later video work. Davis is a founding figure in the “homocore” movement that reinterpreted hardcore punk through queer cultures, as well as the art and music networks of the 1990s that influenced the emergence of the feminist punk Riot Grrrl movement.

The opening image for the 1990s television show America's Most Wanted, with an official looking seal and figure of a bald eagle.

Still from The White to be Angry, 1999


Vaginal Davis

Davis’s touchstone work, The White to be Angry (1999), challenges constructions and desires around white supremacist culture as it circulates across the entire political spectrum. The title of the video is taken from Davis’s live performances and a music album her band Pedro, Muriel & Esther (PME) recorded in Chicago in the mid-1990s. The video is a visual album of songs as chapters, each referencing a different film director, separated by sequences of appropriated footage from television. Davis’s PME bandmate Glen Meadmore appears in a chapter riffing on Clive Barker playing a serial killer, while an Angeleno skinhead by the name of Edward Ghillemhuire plays a character who is both attracted to and violent toward the people his hate speech–spewing elders seek to demonize. The White to Be Angry embraces ambiguity and extravagant dark humor, creating an image of America that remains unnervingly topical today.

A light-skinned man with a shaved head lays back against a Confederate flag with an expression that indicates intensity.

Still from The White to be Angry, 1999


Vaginal Davis

In addition to the many events at the museum featuring the artist (see “Related Events” below), Davis will speak and present previous works on February 6 at 6:00 at the School of the Art Institute as part of its Conversations at the Edge series. Learn more

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