MOTHA AND CHRIS E. VARGAS: CONSCIOUSNESS RAZING at the New Museum

With wry humor and incisive critique, Vargas parodies mainstream social and institutional codes to reimagine queer and trans experience and representation. Vargas is the founder of the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art (MOTHA), a semi-fictional institution that serves as a malleable platform for exhibiting transgender art and hirstory. Taking up the contested legacy of the word “history,” Vargas notes that “for millennia, the patriarchy has had versions of history; for a few years in the 1970s, some white feminists had herstory; but it hasn’t been until now that transgender people have finally had a gender-neutral hirstory all their own.”