VAGINAL DAVIS, THE WHITE TO BE ANGRY, 1999
Vaginal Davis’s touchstone work, The White to be Angry, challenges white supremacy culture in the United States through irony and pastiche. Davis is a key figure in the history of queer music, performance, and video art, whose work bridged the queer performance and punk club scenes of Los Angeles in the late 1970s…
SHIRIN NESHAT, THE FURY
The Fury, comprising a double-channel video installation and a series of black and white photographs. Shot in June 2022, The Fury seeks to capture the Zeitgeist: a sense of foreboding and dread sparked by the resurgence of fascism that we are witnessing…
MICHÈLE PEARSON CLARKE, SUCK TEETH COMPOSITIONS, 2018
This three-channel video and sound installation presents a choral symphony structured around the everyday Caribbean oral gesture of sucking teeth. Referred to variously as kiss teeth, steups, chups, and stchoops, to suck teeth is to produce a sound by sucking in air through the teeth, while pressing the tongue against the upper or lower teeth, with the lips pursed or slightly flattened…
ARTHUR JAFA, APEX, 2013
Jafa has asked, at what scale should we consider the lives of Black Americans? For over thirty years—starting while he worked as a cinematographer—Jafa has compiled notebooks with clippings from a broad array of sources. His notebooks, facsimiles of which are on view nearby, are repositories of references and ideas that serve as reminders of the depth and beauty of Black life in America…
MONA HATOUM, DEEP THROAT, 1996
Mona Hatoum has set the table for us with this artwork, Deep Throat, from 1996. The installation includes a table, roughly 3 feet square and just over 4 feet high, covered in a tablecloth with a single place setting and wooden chair in front of it…
SHIKEITH, STILL WATERS RUN DEEP, 2021
Shikeith explores how Black queer re-making is a sacred space and practice in his two-part installation, still waters run deep / fall in your ways (2021). Using poetry, historical narratives, ambient recordings of children's rhymes, shades of blue, dance, and organic elements such as water, Shikeith maps Black men's negotiations of intimacy and routes toward freedom beyond architectural and societal constraints…
MARLON RIGGS, BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T, 1995
The final film by filmmaker Marlon Riggs, BLACK IS…BLACK AIN'T, jumps into the middle of explosive debates over Black identity. White Americans have always stereotyped African Americans. But the rigid definitions of "Blackness" that African Americans impose on each other, Riggs claims, have also been devastating…
SARA KATHRYN ARLEDGE, WHAT IS A MAN?, 1958
What Is a Man?, whose bemused shrug at that big question manages to encompass onscreen text, preexisting art, time-lapse and science photography, dance, documentary scenes, advertising satire, rhyme, song, even a game of musical chairs…
SHIGEKO KUBOTA, DUCHAMPIANA: NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE, 1976
Inspired by Duchamp's study of motion in his painting, Nude descending a staircase (1912), Kubota uses video to explore movement and temporality. In this single-channel combination of color video, color-synthesized video, and color Super-8 film transferred to video…
LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON, SEDUCTION OF A CYBORG, 1994
Lynn Hershman Leeson has been exploring the impact and potential of nascent technologies in relation to gender, sexuality, and disembodiment for more than 50 years. Her video Seduction of a Cyborg from 1994 presents technology as an infectious disease women are seduced into: The protagonist, a blind woman, agrees to physical treatment that allows her to see images via computer-screen transmission…
LIS RHODES, LIGHT READING, 1978
Lis Rhodes is a filmmaker and founding member of the women’s film and video distribution company Circles, established in 1979. Many of her films employ a primarily abstract language. Rhodes’s film, Light Reading, begins in darkness. A woman’s voice reads extracts of text by the American Modernist writer Gertrude Stein…
SUE DE BEER, DISAPPEAR HERE, 2004
The first intercut image in the short video Disappear Here presents a sheet cake, as from a child's birthday party, showing the sentence "The recollection is a cascade of spatial metaphors" in frosting…
MICKALENE THOMAS, OH MICKEY, 2008
My video and painting installation Oh Mickey! (2008), was inspired by a Balthus painting called La Toilette. In the Balthus, a young girl is wearing lube socks and red slippers, standing alone in an intimate interior space. In my piece, I have a model standing in one of my installations completely nude, except for tube socks and red heels, singing Toni Basil's “Mickey” song...
JUDITH BARRY, IMAGINATION, 1991
An androgynous head is projected as if contained within a minimalist cube. Sounds of the head slowly breathing fill the space. The head is serene, waiting. Suddenly a substance pours over it from all sides, drenching it in what appears to be a bodily fluid. The spectator wants to turn away but can not, the gaze is compelled through the invocation of the scopic drive...
EBONY G. PATTERSON,... THREE KINGS WEEP ..., 2018
Ebony G. Patterson uses lavish surfaces and verdant motifs to entice viewers to contemplate not only the power of beauty and fashion but also historical and contemporary violence against Black people. In . . . three kings weep . . ., a trio of young men shed tears as they sit silently before a backdrop of floral wallpaper and fluttering artificial butterflies...
CRAIG HIGHBERGER, SUPERSTAR IN A HOUSEDRESS, 2004
Jackie Curtis is not a drag queen. Jackie is an artist. A pioneer without a frontier." -- Andy Warhol. Superstar in a Housedress examines the life and legend of Warhol transvestite superstar Jackie Curtis who was a poet, playwright, performer, and one of the great personalities of his time...
NESRINE KHODR, I SWAM IN THE SEA LAST WEEK, 2003
I Swam in the Sea Last Week is a symbolic and poetic video evoking a changing situation through a female body swimming in the sea...
KERRY TRIBE, UNTITLED (POTENTIAL TERRORIST), 2002
In November 2001, a casting notice for (Untitled) Potential Terrorist ran in Backstage West, an L.A-based movie industry trade magazine and actors’ resource, requesting submissions for an untitled, silent, experimental film...
SHELLY SILVER, WE, 1990
Even as the text instructs us otherwise, it is impossible not to read We's two images - that is, to respond to their symbolic quality, their suggestiveness. In a stream of associations, the rhythmic flow of people on the left becomes an ejaculation while the rhythmic hand on the right marks detachment, self-centeredness...
THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA, MOUTH TO MOUTH, 1975
English and Korean words appear on the screen, a mouth forms the shape of an "O," then opens and closes. Is this the beginning of language? In this early videotape, Cha isolates and repeats a simple, physical act — a mouth forming the eight Korean vowel graphemes — so that this ordinary action becomes something primal and riveting…