SARATOGA SPRINGS — The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College welcomes acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Juliana Huxtable to deliver the fifth annual Winter/Miller Lecture at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 13. The in-person event is free and open to the public.
Juliana Huxtable, who was born in Texas in 1987, has distinguished herself with an international reputation as a genre-defying artist known equally for her visual art, writing, music, DJ sets, and the blurring of traditional categories. A Black, transgender, intersex, queer person raised in a Baptist home in Texas, she first gained wide notice in 2015. She was, as Vogue Magazine put it, the “star” of Surround Audience, the Triennial at the New Museum in New York, which featured two of her poems and two self-portrait photographs from the series Universal Crop Tops for All the Self Canonized Saints of Becoming and a sculpture by artist Frank Benson called Juliana in which she was the model.
Also in 2015, she performed There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed at the Museum of Modern Art in a co-commission by MoMA and Performa. The performance explored the ephemeral nature of digital information and the drive for historical documentation in cyberspace through music, sound, video, and lighting. The Guardian, in writing about the work, said, “With her Performa piece, she is allowing others who have been overlooked or discarded by history to come along with her for the ride, right into the center of the contemporary art scene and, indeed, into the middle of a museum about the history of art itself.” In recent years, Huxtable, a published poet, has focused on writing projects and has traveled the word performing as a DJ, with upcoming dates in Austin, Texas, New York City, Frankfurt, and London, among others.
Huxtable’s appearance at the Tang Teaching Museum is by invitation from Roman Cohen ’22, a Studio Art and Gender Studies double major. Cohen holds the prestigious 2021-22 Eleanor Linder Winter ’43 Internship, a one-year pre-professional program in museum work at the Tang for Skidmore students. In this role, Cohen is charged with the research, planning, and coordination of the annual Winter/Miller Lecture.
“I wanted to invite Juliana Huxtable because of the productive discomfort that characterizes her work,” Cohen said. “The way she incorporates her identity into her work is deeply vulnerable, which makes her and her art special. Huxtable’s unapologetic nature, provocativeness, and strength in the context of a society built to oppress the marginalized is not only an inspiration to us all, but also a catalyst for social change on quotidian and systemic levels.”
The Winter/Miller Lecture is made possible through a generous gift by the family of Eleanor “Ellie” Linder Winter ’43. P Her philanthropy provided special opportunities for Skidmore students to learn through exposure to the arts, particularly through her support of the Tang Teaching Museum, which named its Winter Gallery in her honor. Eleanor and her family, including grandson Jonathan Winter ’07, established the Winter Family Exhibition Fund to support students as they collaborate with faculty and Tang curators to create shows for the Winter Gallery. The family also supports the Winter Internship program and an annual scholarship through the Eleanor Linder Winter ’43 Scholarship Fund. Skidmore further recognized Eleanor’s commitment by naming the Department of Art History offices in her honor.
This event is free and open to the public. For more information, call the Tang Visitor Services Desk at 518-580-8080 or visit https://tang.skidmore.edu.
About the Juliana Huxtable
Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987, Bryan-College Station, Texas) is an artist who works across genres of visual art, performance, music, and writing. Whether DJing a nightclub set, creating text-based prints, or making self-portraits, such as her 2015 works Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm) and Untitled (Psychosocial Stuntin’), she defiantly challenges normative ideas of gender, race, sexuality, and beauty. Her work is informed by her experiences as a Black, transgender, intersex, queer person raised in a Baptist home in Texas.
Huxtable has performed in and her work has been shown at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York; Project Native Informant, London; the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim, New York; the Musée D’Art Moderne, Paris; and in Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond at the Tang Teaching Museum. She is a member of the art collective House of Ladosha and a founder of Shock Value, a nightlife collective run by women artists. She is the recipient of a 2019 United States Artists Fellowship and a 2017 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant. Huxtable, a graduate of Bard College, lives and works in New York City.
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