Queer Communion: Ron Athey
Feb 14 – April 4, 2021

Queer Communion: Ron Athey, curated by art historian and performance studies scholar Amelia Jones, offers the first retrospective of the work of Los Angeles-based performance artist Ron Athey. The exhibition and related publication explore Athey’s practice as paradigmatic of a radically alternative mode of art-making as queer communion—the generous extension of self into the world through a mode of open embodiment that enacts creativity in the social sphere through collective engagement as art. Athey, through his significant and generative work as a performance artist, is a singular example of a lived creativity that is at complete odds with the art worlds and marketplaces that have increasingly dominated contemporary art over his largely undervalued career. Having been the focus of a homophobic, AIDS-phobic, and sensationalized political attack during the U.S. culture wars of the 1990s, in which a conservative leader denounced a partially government-funded Athey troupe performance as depraved, Athey’s practice remains a challenge to the politics of today’s renewed culture wars. Athey’s work will be organized in relation to thematic intensities and overlapping communities spanning religion, queer subcultures, music, literature, performance, film, and theater, and displayed via photographic, archival, and video documentation as well as artworks and props from the original performances. The exhibition will travel to ICA Los Angeles in summer 2021.

Ron Athey will be in NYC all of February installing and participating in related events plus the Elliot Reed Duets and talks. Special performance with Athey, Hermes Pittakos, Reed, and Mecca will take place in the gallery February 15, CCTV-ed and twitched out to the world. see next event for these deets.

http://participantinc.org/seasons/season-19/queer-communion-ron-athey

Divinity and Pigpen crowns