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Chris Vargas Video

  • my name is Chris Vargas, and I am an assistant professor in the art
  • department
  • I teach in the time-based art studio area
  • MOTHA is the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art. It's a conceptual art
  • project by me and I do many projects under this name. I won an award from
  • creative capital for a project called trans hirstory in 99 objects
  • I'm inviting artists to like create objects associated or related to
  • trans hirstory in some way so the project is a series of exhibitions and then an
  • eventual catalog
  • there is also a lot of possibilities for different components like multimedia
  • touring presentation about the objects podcast to sort of data online
  • participatory digital archive and where people can upload their own objects that
  • they think have significance to trans history kind of before this moment in a
  • lot of ways trans identity and culture has existed under the surface and sort
  • of in the background out of necessity really because trans lives just needed
  • just for survival needed to not be visible
  • luckily we're coming into understanding that one person can't represent a whole
  • community and thankfully there's like a myriad of experiences out there but
  • there's it's still limited in a lot of ways so it's exciting to just be engaged
  • with a lot of people's artistic and scholarly work and that really relates
  • to teaching because that's sort of what i do in the classroom i get exposed and
  • I get to be witness to all this creative production