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96510 ca object representations media 13144 publiclarge

Vaginal Davis: Blick und Begehren (Gaze and Desire)

Date: September 28 2017

Identifier: 17_0924

Legendary artist and punk icon Vaginal Davis kicks off the public programming for “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” with a one-night-only performance in the New Museum Theater. Davis’s vivacious work deploys radical politics, makeshift aesthetics, and wicked humor in powerful artworks spanning a variety of mediums, from music and performance to painting, sculpture, and film. In the late 1970s, as the frontwoman for the punk band the Afro Sisters, Davis drew inspiration from Angela Davis and the Black Panthers. Her unique brand of punk drag aesthetics—deemed “drag terrorism” by the late scholar José Esteban Muñoz—revels in a refusal to be recuperated by the mainstream. “I was always too gay for the punks and too punk for the gays. I am a societal threat,” Davis recalled in a recent interview with Grace Dunham.

Performances