Blog

Friday, January 19, 2024

Time: 6:00pm – 8:00pm 

Location: 500 Capp St. San Francisco, California

GET YOUR TICKETS

Join us in celebrating the launch of the book Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects from the Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art (MOTHA) in San Francisco. The book features a series of commissioned photographs by Marcel Pardo Ariza, and the editors are thrilled to present a pop-up book launch event as part of Marcel’s fabulous Orquídeas installation and program series at 500 Capp St. Marcel will discuss Orquídeas as the project nears the end of its residency, and the book’s co-editors, David Evans Frantz, Christina Linden, and Chris E. Vargas, will talk about the book while everyone enjoys snacks and drinks provided by 500 Capp St. Books will be available for purchase and signing as long as supplies last!

Surveying over three centuries of trans life, this volume brings together a capacious selection of artworks, archival documents, publications, and artifacts. The book is a continuation of artist Chris E. Vargas’s MOTHA, a museum forever “under construction” that exists as a creative and critical exploration of LGBTQ archives, asking audiences to think critically about how a visual history of transgender life could and should look.

About the speakers:
Chris E. Vargas is a video maker & interdisciplinary artist, an artist, the founder of the Museum of Trans Hirstory and Art, and co-editor of Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects. His work deploys humor and performance to explore the complex ways that queer and trans people negotiate spaces for themselves within historical and institutional memory and popular culture. He is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital award and a 2020 John S. Guggenheim fellowship.

David Evans Frantz is a curator based in Los Angeles, and co-editor of Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects. He began his curatorial career at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, where he first worked with Chris E. Vargas and MOTHA. He also co-edited the catalog for Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. He curated the accompanying exhibition as well as the exhibition Teddy Sandoval And The Butch Gardens School Of Art, currently on view at the Vincent Price Art Museum, with C. Ondine Chavoya.

Christina Linden met Chris E. Vargas through friends. She met David Evans Frantz while conducting research for the exhibition Queer California: Untold Stories, which she curated at the Oakland Museum of California, and in which MOTHA had an installation. She is the Director of Academic and Public Programs at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Marcel Pardo Ariza is the featured artist of 500 Capp Street’s recent exhibition, Orquídeas. They are a trans, nonbinary visual artist, curator, and cultural worker whose work explores the relationship of representation, intergenerational kinship, and queerness through constructed photographs and site-specific installations. Through staging and collaboration, Ariza deploys sets as a site of possibility for (re)building a story and materializing alternative and attainable present and future narratives. Ariza enjoys playing with the arbitrary rigidity that is often present in the photographic medium and the work is invested in creating long-term interdisciplinary collaborations and opportunities that are nonhierarchical and equitable. Marcel is the current recipient of the SECA Art Award.

DECEMBER 1

8-11pm

Cafe Porno is a dessert pop up collaboration between Marcel Pardo Ariza and Artist-Chef Salimatu Amabebe. All proceeds from the event will go to the Naughty Nurse Mobile, a van that supports sex workers during late nights in the Mission District.