Juliana Huxtable’s work explores the fragmented and mutable nature of identity by utilizing race, gender, and queerness as media to explore the possibilities of post-identity politics. She uses a range of outlets to unpack these themes including self-portraiture, text, performance, nightlife, music, and poetry. The ubiquity of social technology figures centrally in her work. She explores the ways these structures reveal and conceal certain histories while seeking ways to liberate new histories and speculative worlds. Her modes of expression are fluid, which is reflected in her musical arrangements and performance art.

Huxtable’s visual art references her own body and history as she examines sociopolitical issues. The 2012–13 series Seven Archetypes delves into the artist’s experience of transitioning in multiple ways as well as the ideologies that inform the way we experience and authenticate gender and sexuality. In Untitled (For Stewart), a work that incorporates one of Huxtable’s prosaic texts, the artist revisits her childhood through the analysis of video game avatars and the coded sexism therein. History (Period Piece), another work in the series, is a digitally altered photograph that features the artist staring intently at the viewer perched in front of a tapestry, referencing colonial textile. Her work generally activates these histories to show how they continue to inform collective perceptions and desires. The artist’s nude self-portraits viscerally call attention to the gaze, the body, and our shared preconceptions of race and queer sexuality. Huxtable’s overtly feminized and sexualized posture in pieces like Nuwaubian Princess and Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm) turn the viewer’s attention to her body and produces a simultaneously alluring and combative display. These portraits allow Huxtable not only to celebrate her own body but to draw critical attention to the gaze and interrogate the constructs that fuel our reluctance towards discussions of gender and race.

Huxtable’s work has been featured in group presentations at MoMA PS1, New York; White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York; Take Ecstasy with Me, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Frieze Projects, London; and the 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, among other venues.

Image: Juliana Huxtable, There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed, 2015, performance documentation. Courtesy of Julieta Cervantes/MoMA

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Tags: Juliana Huxtable, Loop, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Visiting Artists Program