Writer, performer, visual artist, curator, filmmaker, musician. A queer icon, “drag terrorist,” and grand madame of the queercore punk movement. A Blacktress, the doyenne of intersex outsider art, a sexual repulsive, a societal threat. And, of course, there’s the name Vaginal Davis itself, a tribute to the Black revolutionary Angela Davis.
Born intersex and mixed race in South Central Los Angeles, Davis has both defied and defined a universe of labels. Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product, her first major institutional exhibition in the United States, at MoMA PS1 in New York, takes its title from a faded advertisement for a Black hair-care product that hung in a Korean-owned store on Hollywood Boulevard where Davis shopped for wigs and dollar eyelashes. “Magnificent product” describes the five decades of Davis’s volcanic output, but also Davis herself, an artist who seems to have sprung, Athena-like, from her own forehead. It’s a big show, spread across three floors, each section anchored by one of her many disciplines—video, live performance, music, paintings, sculpture, and archival material. Davis’s writing and her pleasure in wordplay form a major tributary. Another reflects her expansive approach to art-making: The rooms fill with—and draw life from—her merry band of collaborators, fellow artists and friends who have contributed to her hydras of invention.
I take back that thing I said about Athena. If the show could be said to have a spiritual predecessor, it would be People Who Led Me to My Plays (1987), the foundational autobiography by the playwright Adrienne Kennedy. Both artists were voracious readers and fangirls of movies stars and literary classics; both carry the garlands of their family’s lore. Davis’s artistic sensibility was further sharpened by her queerness and her working-class roots. Her “sister outsider” status has powered her rejection of the monied and the mainstream, as well as her embrace of renegade punk and DIY impulses, coalescing into what is arguably her most supreme creation: herself.
Take, for example, the opener to Vaginal Creme Davis: The Woman Behind the Mystique, a celebrity profile in an issue of one of Davis’s seminal zines, Fertile La Toya Jackson: “As she sips champagne on a white bearskin rug next to the jacuzzi on her balcony, Vaginal slips into a rare pensive mood and begins to reveal all to the diligent young reporter sent from Agony.” (Agony! Davis has a genius for naming things.)
Vaginal Davis, Middle Sex, 2024. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Steven Paneccasio.
At a press preview on the show’s opening night, the artist held court in the exhibition’s first gallery, which reimagines Davis’s first public show, exhibited at Los Angeles’s Pio Pico Library when she was a precocious eight-year-old. The installation, a collaboration with the artist and archivist Jonathan Berger (whom Davis has known since he was nineteen), takes its inspiration from Davis’s lifelong obsession with L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Wall drawings and two rows of gnomic cast-aluminum sculptures resting on exquisite velvet cushions incarnate characters from the Oz universe, including girl warriors, the witch-queen Zixi, and Princess Ozma, who transforms from girl to boy.
Poised on a metal folding chair, Davis dispensed advice for making the most of an art opening: “Don’t even look at the art. Just socialize. We need that right now more than anything,” she said. “Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get some sexin’. Then come back for the art—or don’t!”
While I took her meaning to heart—given the option, always choose life over art (or better yet, as Davis’s work does, merge the two)—I was here on assignment. As soon as she finished her remarks, I scurried into the next chamber, anxious about the ground I had to cover. In Hofpfisterei (2024/2025), a room-size installation devoted to Davis’s text works, I put on headphones and watched a VHS recording of a reading Davis gave in 1992 at a bookstore in New York City. As a writer, I’ve attended numerous dullish book readings (including my own); surely Vaginal would deliver something different? Reader, she did not disappoint. In the video, Davis waits a few beats before making her grand entrance. She swiftly commands the room, kicking things off with a poem, partly inspired, she explains, by W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas (Davis was an English major at the University of California, Los Angeles). The poem is made up entirely of one word, girl, repeated and intoned with as much variation as there are emotional states in the human condition.
Portrait of Vaginal Davis, 1993. Courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art NY/LA. Photo: Reynaldo Rivera.
Next, I turned my attention to a tabletop where copies of Davis’s zines (1972–97) were scattered, including Fertile La Toya Jackson, Sucker, and Shrimp (“The Magazine for Licking and Sucking Bigger and Better Feet”). A tall, thin man—a ringer for the writer Geoff Dyer—introduced himself as Dora. He beamed as he flipped through a zine, searching for pictures of himself, his friends, his memories. “Look, that’s me,” he said, pointing to a photo taken at an Eyes of Laura Mars–themed drag party. A few others who’d gathered at the table, like Dora, had flown from LA to be here for the opening. A woman who called herself Purple Paulina gifted me a handmade bracelet.
I learned they’d all met Davis and one another at Retail Slut on Melrose Avenue, once a fashion mecca for goths, glam rockers, and ravers. (“I knew Vaginal when she was straight!” Dora quipped). The register counter of Retail Slut was, in fact, where Davis first sold her zines.
I shared that I’d been commissioned to write a review of the show. “I’ve never done this before,” I admitted. “How should I enter it?”
“Enter from the top!”
“Just make it up—that’s what Vaginal would do!”
Did they ever imagine their old friend would be the subject of a major show like this?
“Yes. Because she’s authentically vaginal!”
While early-edition zines sit inside protective vitrines, the curators’ decision to make “fresh” copies available for handling was a good one. The pleasure and purpose of zines, cheaply assembled, small-batch, and reliant on hand-to-hand circulation, wither if these objects are made too precious. But this being a museum setting, where touching is verboten, it took a minute for folks to warm to the task and receive reassurance from the guard that the copy machine in the center of the room is, in fact, meant to be used. All this hands-on activity made for the buzziest room in the exhibition, as people curated and duplicated their own selections from the zines, as well as printouts with excerpts from Davis’s long-running blog, Speaking from the Diaphragm, where she recommends books, delights in the naked male torso, dishes on the art world—all while switching deliciously between first and third person.
Vaginal Davis, HAG — small, contemporary, haggard (detail), 2012. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Steven Paneccasio.
Davis used to print her zines at her office job at UCLA (her boss was Bob Locklear—yes, Heather’s father!) and threw stapling parties at her apartment. The artist credits her resourceful, DIY approach to art-making to her mother, Mary Magdalene Duplantier, who did not consider herself an artist yet was always making things from everyday household supplies. In this spirit, in the 1980s, Davis operated an art gallery out of her Sunset Boulevard apartment, the footprint of which is reproduced at MoMA PS1 as a tilted Ames room and titled HAG—small, contemporary, haggard (2012). You share the inside of the structure with life-size incarnations of Justin Timberlake and Mariah Carey molded—kneaded?—from sourdough, along with portraits Davis made of her personal lodestars like Pearl Bailey and Ingeborg Bachmann, painted on flyers, hotel napkins, and flattened cereal boxes with discounted or discontinued lipsticks, mascara, and eyeliner pencils.
The lore is that Davis opened the gallery to attract a boyfriend, but it didn’t work. This has since taken on the beat of a punch line, but the condition of lovelornness, Davis has said in interviews, has shaped her practice: “I realized at a young age that I was never going to be a person of sexual desire. I just worked on doing art shit in my own way and putting out stuff and trying to amuse myself.”
What doing art shit her own way has attracted is an ever-evolving band of outsiders. These friends and collaborators share Davis’s wavelength for making things and making things happen in gleeful defiance of the mainstream. In two short films, The White to Be Angry (1999) and That Fertile Feeling (1983), both screening in the exhibition, the artist and her collaborators build a world where white-supremacist skinheads read Angela Davis and a skateboarding transwoman gives birth to eleven-tuplets. These collaborations have also taken the form of literal punk band. In a room devoted to archives from her early years in Los Angeles, you’ll find promo stills, posters, and recordings of Davis performing with members of ¡Cholita! The Female Menudo, Black Fag, and the Afro Sisters (featuring two white women backup singers in Afro wigs).
Vaginal Davis, The White to be Angry, 1999. Film still. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.
Bringing us to closer the present is Choose Mutation (2024/2025), a collaboration with the artist collective CHEAP, based in Berlin, Davis’s homebase for the past twenty years. Projected on a motorized billboard, this heady sound-image work, inspired by the writings of philosopher Paul B. Preciado, is mounted in the museum’s porous, double-height gallery. Surrounded by portraits of CHEAP members taken by Annette Frick, Choose Mutation engages with the forces of surveillance and biopolitical control while insisting on the presence and resistance of morphing nonbinary bodies, the matrix of Davis’s radical intervention.
A few days later, I did come back for the art. I wanted to peruse the ephemera and archival photographs hanging from clothespins in The Wicked Pavilion: Tween Bedroom (2021), a reproduction of Davis’s very pink childhood bedroom (or her current bedroom, depending on your source). Photos of friends and family mingle with headshots of movie stars and writers, among them Greta Garbo, Audre Lorde, and Davis’s sister, Diane Williams. An enormous plaster phallus atop a twin bed dominates the room, rotating slowly on a platform like an impractical gizmo at a world’s fair. It’s hard to unsee. Tween Bedroom offers a tender, winking nod to the molting and molten period of self-becoming and sexual longing, and to the desire to surround yourself with your heroes and idols.
This Künstlerroman in three dimensions extends to the companion installation next door, The Wicked Pavillion: The Fantasia Library (2021). There you’ll find a glass case of Davis’s literary influences: Dawn Powell’s satire of New York’s literati, from which Wicked Pavillion takes its name, rubs shoulders with Wanda Coleman, Gertrude Stein, and burlesque queen Liz Renay’s pulpy How to Attract Men. Running along the length of one wall is a shelf displaying the spines of dozens of books Davis hasn’t yet found time to write (a few of my favorite titles: Lips to the Floor and Stillborn Celluloid).
Vaginal Davis, The Wicked Pavilion: Tween Bedroom, 2021. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Steven Paneccasio.
I was also there to catch a show by the shock-rock band the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, whose members are old friends of Davis’s. Because rockstars, the set was running late. In a corridor, I ran into the artist Beatrice Glow, who makes gorgeously chilling multimedia works on colonial violence and history.
Was Beatrice a Vaginal fan? Well, in fact, when Beatrice was a nineteen-year-old baby at New York University, she took a class with Davis, who had everyone invent a persona for themselves and put on a speakeasy cabaret. Beatrice designed a dress lit with electricity, which prompted Davis to declare: “You are Beatrice Glow with the glowing vagina!” The name stuck. How could it not, when you’ve been anointed by the grand madame herself?
The band took the stage in their signature scurrilous wigs and alien-kabuki makeup. Gathered in the museum’s open-air courtyard was maybe the most intergenerational and multiracial crowd I’ve seen outside of a mass New York City protest—gray-haired rockers in black hoodies; lithesome Afropunks and art-world denizens in statement footwear; a Chinese girl in blue pigtails. The band’s devotees surged to the edge of the stage. For one afternoon, we were a little utopia, a loose, misfit confederacy of city dwellers united against the death drive heaving outside the museum gates—ICE attacks, shitty health care, censorship, transphobia, the list goes on and on. Here was a spot in time where a fuller, freer sense of life, defiant and communal, swelled—
Underware Drawer!
Underware Drawer!
I wanna clean out my underware drawer!
I spotted Vaginal Davis on the outer rim of the crowd, resplendent in a pink cowl and gown, pumping both fists in the air as she shouted along to the chorus with the other superfans. Davis was part of the scene; she also made the scene. She gives good life force. It was cool to see her getting it back.
