ABOUT THE WorkLive Performance
Asian Art Museum (2014)
Broad Museum (2016)
Plaza de Diego in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2016)
Maccarone Gallery, NYC (2016)
Anderson Collection Museum, Stanford, California (2017)
ExTeresa Arte Actual, D.F. Mexico (2019)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2026)
Using laughter and her own nude body as material, Ibarra uncovers the vexed relation racialized subjects have to not only one’s own skin, but also one’s own entanglements and knots (skeins) with whiteness and power. Nude Laughing has been performed in various sites. In each performance, Ibarra responds to all the complexities that come with engaging varied environments and the specific objects and multiple characters that belong to it. Mindful of these specificities and complexities, she contends with both the hostility and anxieties surrounding our current time and the class, gendered and racial hierarchies in tension with the museum’s holdings and/or the site itself. She considers these holdings as not only the museum’s collections, but also the spatial expressions, structured choreographies, broad histories, rhythms and flows that constitute a site’s political and epistemic intensities.
PRESS
At the MFA Boston, Contemporary Artists Turn the Gaze Back on the Museum’s Nudes
THE BOSTON REVIEW
Thea Quiray Tagle
Naked and on Display
BOSTON GLOBE
Murray White
Best of 2016 in ARTFORUM
ACADEMIC ARTICLES
Review by Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 2017
Amelia Jones. In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance, Routledge Press, 2020
Ivan Ramos. Breaking Down, Breaking Together: Xandra Ibarra’s Nude Laughing and the Violence of the Encounter in Duke University Press, 2025