“If Gender is a Kind of Doing” Gallery Exhibition April 9th-May25th

“If Gender is a Kind of Doing”


Exhibition: Wednesday, April 9 - May 25, 2013.
Opening Reception: Friday, April 12 / 7:00:pm / $5 -$10
MCCLA Galleries
Exhibit curated by: Ella Diaz

Artists: Regina José Galindo, Deborah Roberts, Elizabeth “Oscar” Maynard, Rye Purvis, Laura Lucía Sanz, Lorraine García-Nakata, Ana Teresa Fernandez.

This exhibit privileges formal achievement in visual art, showcasing expertise and training in visual fields; but it also asks “if gender is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing?” (Butler 2004, 35). Engaging Judith Butler’s question, the exhibit analyzes constructions of the female gender by including several compositions of the female form. From painting and drawing, to video and performance art, the works move viewers beyond formal values of art, and toward an understanding of the racial, patriarchal, and classed constructions of gender.

Furthermore, If gender is a kind of doing is an annual show for the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, and, historically, a Latina-only show. This fact complicates the bodies that are on display because many of them represent the female form outside racial definitions of the “Latina,” challenging notions of what is exotic and what is “normal.”