April 4, 2026 - Aug 2, 2026
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
GROUP EXHIBITION - SUBVERT, REPAIR, RECLAIM: CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS TAKE BACK THE NUDE
“Subvert, Repair, Reclaim” brings together multimedia works by twelve contemporary artists who critically engage with representations of the nude in Western art history. Responding to objectification, exploitation, and erasure embedded within these images, they confront entrenched gender structures and power dynamics in work that resonates with present-day issues of bodily autonomy, agency, and accountability.
Featuring works made since 2012, the exhibition symbolically reaches into the frames—and framing—of the nude as it has appeared within encyclopedic museum contexts. Through performative gestures, archival interventions, and acts of redaction and repair, these artists challenge inherited narratives and expose the structures that have long governed visibility, authorship, and desire. From Xandra Ibarra positioning her critical Turn Around Sidepiece (2018) on a spinning marble pedestal; to Rachelle Mozman Solano undermining the diaries of Paul Gauguin through photography, video, and collage; to Betty Tompkins overlaying familiar art-historical images with the often-disingenuous apologies and defenses from those accused of abuses during in the #MeToo era, nudity becomes not a site of passive display, but a critical tool for refusal, self-fashioning, and redefinition.
The exhibition presents an intergenerational group of artists working across performance, video, painting, sculpture, photography, sound, and collage. Artworks by Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Nona Faustine, Derek Fordjour, Xandra Ibarra, Maya Jeffereis, Gisela Charfauros McDaniel, Joiri Minaya, Rachelle Mozman Solano, Cato Ouyang, Katherine Sherwood, Betty Tompkins, and Salman Toor not only challenge the narrative, but actively infiltrate the established canon from a place of knowledge and resistance.
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Feb 25, 2026 - Jun 27, 2026
ONE Archives, Los Angeles, CA
GROUP EXHIBITION - NEED ME
NEED ME, or, (de)mystifying the myth of the modern primitive presents the western renaissance of body piercing as a definitively queer history rooted in the sexual underground – one that provided a vital bloodline to the pulse of queer artistic production through the 1980s and 1990s. Sourced from archival research primarily conducted at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Body Piercing Archive, and the GLBT Historical Society, NEED ME is ultimately grounded in the archive itself. The exhibition will trace the networks of queer individuals and present evidence of piercings’ lineage in kink through magazines, correspondence, ephemera, and artwork. NEED ME explores icons such as Jim Ward and Fakir Musafar while synthesizing artworks and artists who contributed to what has been termed the age of the ‘modern primitive.’ Works and ephemera from Catherine Opie, Ron Athey, Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose, Annie Sprinkle, Efrain Gonzalez, and Xandra Ibarra among others, will illuminate the nuanced and layered drive toward the modern practice of piercing, working to enrich an intrinsically queer story. The exhibition does not intend to be a holistic survey or primarily a history exhibition. New work by artist-in-residence Noorann Matties will provide a haunting meditation on the fraught history of the ‘modern primitive.’ NEED ME intends to take a stab at the first-ever exhibition focused on the queer history of modern body piercing.
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Jan 31 & Feb 1, 2026
Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Archive, Berkeley, CA
PERFORMANCE - FRIENDS OF PERFECTION
Small Press Traffic, in conjunction with BAMPFA and The Lab, presents Friends of Perfection, a Poets Theater experiment inspired by the communes of 1970s San Francisco. The project pushes the collaborative chaos of Poets Theater to extremes: twelve writers, three co-directors, a sprawling cast, puppets, and possession. The anarchic script was written as an “exquisite corpse” by West Coast writers and artists from Vancouver to LA: Styles Alexander, Amelia Bande, Gabriele Christian, Maxe Crandall, Wren Farrell, Sloka Krishnan, Brittany Newell, Brontez Purnell, Rowena Richie, Maria Silk, Ryan Tacata, and Julie Tolentino.
Another performance takes place at The Lab on January 31. Collaboratively written and performed by Styles Alexander, Mike Chin, Gabriele Christian, Maxe Crandall, Kota Ezawa, Xandra Ibarra, Sloka Krishnan, Kevin Lo, montes marin, Cornelius O, Sam Sax, Maria Silk, and featuring animations by Craig Calderwood and puppetry by Mike Chin.
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Oct 25, 2025 - Feb 7, 2026
Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA
GROUP EXHIBITION - LOVE LETTERS TO ALIENS
Curated by Sholeh Asgary, Love Letters to Aliens is an exhibition and event series featuring work by Rana Hamadeh, Xandra Ibarra, Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo, Maryam Tafakory, and Yue Xiang, with performances by Roco Córdova, and considers the notion of the alien in its most expansive sense—from the extraterrestrial to the intimate.
The project is framed by the drawn, decomposed, or transgressed borders of bodies, land, and matter. It examines how seduction, repulsion, and obfuscation can function as strategies of survival and acts of celebration in the erosion of entrenched systems.
From counter-archives to material excess and tender address, the artists of Love Letters to Aliens incorporate various mediums and methodologies in their works which include sculpture, drawing, performance, video, and grief work. Collectively, these works demonstrate the ways in which archives, affect, and material can render certain lives legible while withholding others.
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Sept 26, 2025 - Jan 30, 2026
Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, CO
GROUP EXHIBITION - OPEN-HEARTED
Open Hearted examines the history, meaning, and contemporary realities of health care and well-being. Moving beyond the individualistic framework of “self-care,” the exhibition reframes wellness as a collective project—one that necessitates advocacy across many levels of society and emphasizes, as writer Corrine Fitzpatrick suggests, that “health is always in relation to power.” While the title evokes a sensibility, and the ideal capacities of health care to be preventative, diagnostic, and/or palliative, it also suggests an invasive medical procedure, thereby drawing a connection to the risk and vulnerability inherent in both.
Featuring works by artists: MG Bernard, Gregg Bordowitz, Melissa Cody, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ben Gould, Xandra Ibarra, Kapwani Kiwanga, Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, Carolyn Lazard, Kate Leonard, Ani Liu, Jordan Lord, Park McArthur, and Constantina Zavitsanos.
Open Hearted is curated by Katja Rivera in collaboration with the exhibiting artists. Support for the exhibition is generously provided by The Anschutz Foundation and Colorado Creative Industries.
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Nov 26 - 30, 2025
Film Kunst Festival, Zurich, Switzerland
FILM SCREENING - UNTITLED FUCKING
Porny Days is a five-day Film and Art Festival on the theme of Body and Sexuality, held annually in Zurich. Addressing the representations of the body and sex, the Porny Days set a counterpoint to mainstream pornography and neoprüderie. The festival and brings a broad audience closer to the versatility of sexuality and the associated topics.
Untitled Fucking (2013), a collaboration between Amber Hawk Swanson and Xandra Ibarra, will screen at the Film Kunst Festival as part of the Porn from the Bottom program curated by Emre Busse. Porn from the Bottom insists that pornography is not subordinate to culture, but central to it. Looking “from below” means not only affirming stigmatized sexual positions, but seeing history differently: from the ground up, through lust, shame, fantasy, and survival.
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Sept 4, 2025 at 7pm
SFMOMA, WattisTheater
PERFORMANCE - WEIRDO NIGHT
For one night only, Weirdo Night comes to SFMOMA. Hosted by “crackpot genius” Dynasty Handbag, this underground variety show celebrates the absurd, the brilliant, and the beautifully unhinged through comedy, music, performance art, drag, and whatever else can happen onstage.
Originally developed in San Francisco in 2001, Dynasty Handbag returns to the Bay to help keep SF weird (if that’s still possible), joined by OBSIDIENNE OBSURD, Xandra Ibarra, Cliff Hengst, and HAAGS (Emilia Richeson of Ponysweat and Jibz Cameron). Expect things to go gloriously off the rails.
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May 29, 2025 -Aug 23, 2025
SFAC Gallery, San Francisco, CA
GROUP EXHIBITION - SERVICE TENSION
The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Main Gallery is excited to present Service Tension, a group exhibition curated by Elena Gross and Leila Weefur featuring work by Salimatu Amabebe, Ricki Dwyer, Xandra Ibarra, Sasha Kelley, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Autumn Wallace. The exhibition will explore the messiness and complexity of the queer body.
The title, Service Tension, is an interpolation of “surface tension,” a phrase that signifies a resistant relationship between two surfaces and the title of the exhibition suggests a playful interrogation of sex, penetration, and power. The works in the exhibition trouble notions of masculinity within queer dynamics as well as sexual desire.
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March 30, 2025
Queercircle, London, UK
GROUP SCREENING - T-MASC EROTICS THROUGH THE CAM HOLE
In this film program we focus on the the erotic and trans masculine can be interpreted through film to create new hybrid forms of erotic storytelling through the t-masc gaze.
By having a digital archive, Otherness Archive hopes to make the discoverability of trans work more accessible. Through our recent grant, we chose to focus on building an accessible archive, with the first category being dedicated towards the trans masculine experience*. Through research, a call out and programed events this archive so far, is the result of two years' research.
When Otherness Archive uses the term ‘trans masculine’, we are referring to all the nuances of the trans masc experience in moving image work, and to the various expressions of masculinity found across the trans community including, but not limited to, trans men, non-binary people, dykes, butches, bull daggers, crowdaggers, studs, t-fags, and gender non-conforming people. We really want to deconstruct heteropatriarchal barriers to access, such as age restrictions and mislabelling that further obscures trans works of art.
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Hannah Wilke, Untitled (Gum on Palm Fronds, Los Angeles), 1976. © Scharlatt / HWCALA / ARS N.Y.
Jan 26, 2025 - Mar 9, 2025
Personal Space, Vallejo, CA
GROUP EXHIBITION - FOLDS
Folds emerges from the work of three late, iconic feminist artists (Laura Aguilar, Ana Mendieta, and Hannah Wilke) whose connection to the landscape and the body has deeply inspired an intergenerational scope of artists active today. Traversing a range of disciplines including photography, video, sculpture, drawing, and performance, this expansive cohort builds upon their predecessors’ legacies through the varied lenses of physical and environmental health, illness, disability, gender oppression, cultural hybridity, and spirituality. The visceral, emotional, and undeniably sensual qualities of many of the works are amplified through a shared embrace of the paradoxical; they are at once vulnerable and resilient; serious and humorous; devastating and celebratory; present and absent; seen and unseen. Collectively, and across time, these artists suggest that perhaps their true power lies within the folds of what they choose not to reveal to us.
Opening Reception Sunday January 26, 2025 from 2-5pm.
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Oct 5, 2024 - Mar 2, 2025
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
GROUP EXHIBITION - SCIENTIA SEXUALIS
Scientia Sexualis centers research-driven interventions into raced and gendered assumptions that structure scientific disciplines governing our sense of the sexual body. The artists in this exhibition bring attention to the material, conceptual, and psychic forms of the lab and the clinic as aesthetics that operate across scientific and artistic discourses. The exhibition catalogue will feature new writing by leading interdisciplinary scholars who will map key concepts (sex, race, Indigeneity), materials (instruments, specimens, biomatter), and disciplines (psychiatry, anthropology, reproductive medicine) that the artists engage through their work. Together with the catalogue and related programming, Scientia Sexualis aims to examine and reconfigure the relationship between art and science and, in turn, to create an alternative access point to the history of science where sex, gender, and pleasure are concerned.
Featured artists include: Panteha Abareshi, Dotty Attie, Louise Bourgeois, Nao Bustamante, Andrea Carlson, Demian DinéYazhi’, Nicole Eisenman, El Palomar, dean erdmann, Jes Fan, Nicki Green, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger, Xandra Ibarra, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Joseph Liatela, Candice Lin, Carlos Motta, Wangechi Mutu, Young Joon Kwak & Gala Porras-Kim, Cauleen Smith, P. Staff, Joey Terrill, Chris E. Vargas, Millie Wilson, and Geo Wyex.
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Sept 21, 2024 - Feb 2, 2025
Chet Holifield Federal Building, Los Angeles, CA
GROUP EXHIBITION - PURGATORIO
Curated by April Baca, PURGATORIO visualizes the Holifield's architectural and political contradictions and its role in political violence, technological mediation, and communal displacement, particularly along the U.S.-Mexico border. The exhibition takes its title from an unfinished poem by American poet Hart Crane, whose ambivalence and fascination with Mexico and its varied landscapes conceived of exile from a rampant U.S. technological ethos as a type of purgatory. Purgatorio's hybrid presentation will feature intergenerational and regionally dispersed artists whose artworks will be represented in a virtual remodeling of the Chet Holifield Federal Building in Laguna Nigel, CA
Los Angeles-based artist Peter Wu will design the show's online presentation, Purgatorio, which will be staged as both an installation in the larger physical exhibition (Digital Capture) and as its own independent online exhibition hosted through Wu+'s online gallery EPOCH.
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