VAGINAL DAVIS

An archival display focused on her early career in her hometown, Los Angeles, traces the tributaries of her early career in the 1980s and ‘90s. A founding mother of the city’s queercore scene, Ms. Davis was, in her own words, “too gay for the punk scene and too punk for the gays.” Early videos, photographs, and ephemera detail her critical position at this nexus of the punk and queer worlds, highlighting her bands—¡Cholita! The Female Menudo; black fag; Pedro, Muriel, & Esther (PME); and the Afro Sisters, whose1984 unreleased album gives the exhibition its title—as well as performances, photoshoots, and club nights. In a dedicated cinema room, films such as That Fertile Feeling (1983) and The White to Be Angry (1999) demonstrate Ms. Davis’s embodied pastiche of social mores and horrors, exposing cracks in the myth of a singular identity.