Collaborations
Alexandro Segade is an interdisciplinary artist whose work often takes a collective form.
My Barbarian
Founded in LA in the year 2000 by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade, My Barbarian is a genre-defying collective whose theater, video, music and visual art projects confront political questions about identity, collectivity, class, culture and taste through performance and play.
My Barbarian, Broke Baroque Suite, performance for camera, Los Angeles, 2012.
My Barbarian has presented work in museums including MoMA, LACMA, MoCA LA, and SFMoMA, as well as festivals, galleries and public spaces. The group has had solo exhibitions in New York at Participant Inc. (2009), The Goethe Institute (2014) and The New Museum, (2016); in Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum, 2010, and Human Resources, 2012, and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 2013, which represents the group; as well as Museo El Eco, Mexico City, 2010; Gallery 400, Chicago, 2014; Yaffo 23, Jerusalem, 2015; My Barbarian was included in two Performa Biennials (2006, 2008), two California Biennials (2004, 2006), the Biennale de Montréal (2008), the Baltic Triennial (2009) and the Whitney Biennial (2014).
My Barbarian has received awards from United States Artists (2018), Foundation for Contemporary Art (2013), Creative Capital (2012), Art Matters (2008), and the City of LA (2010). My Barbarian has been written about by Hilton Als in the New Yorker, interviewed by Andrea Fraser in Bomb, and discussed in Cruising Utopia by Jose Esteban Muñoz.
A.R.M.
A.R.M., “Poses,” multimedia durational performance, Whitney Museum, NYC 2017.
A.R.M. is a collaboration of artists Alexandro Segade, Robbie Acklen, and Malik Gaines. A.R.M.’s shapeshifting projects use a promiscuous mix of performance, video, photography, sound, and installation to explore queer subjects. Originally inspired by PaJaMa, A.R.M. has used their photos as scores for making a body of work linking our present visibility to the innovations of the closeted past. ARM has collaborated with other artists, including actors and musicians in Norway and Colombia, to queer dominant mythologies of masculinity, from Arthurian legend to Catholic iconography to gym culture.
ARM, “Arcángel,” mail art project / performance at Espacio Odéon, Bogotá, Colombia, 2018.
Blood Fountain, the group’s most autobiographical work to date, is a non-memorial /anti-monument, reflecting the contemporary un-forgetting of HIV. “Blood Fountain” work is an entanglement of those who are negative, taking the daily sacrament of Truvada, and those who are undetectable, both linked by a network of desire, collective trauma, pharmaceuticals, and pleasure. A.R.M. explores the histories, herstories, archives, and missing links of gay memory.
Courtesy the Artists
Alexandro Segade and Amy Ruhl, Popular Revolt, New Original Works Festival, REDCAT, Los Angeles, 2019
Established in New York in 2013 by Alexandro Segade and Malik Gaines, Courtesy the Artists invites collaborators to respond to archives of political culture. Notable projects include The Meeting, MoMAPS1, 2013; Trad., Recess, NYC, 2013, Songs of the Civil War, Studio Museum in Harlem, 2014, and The Shoot, The Kitchen, NYC, 2014. For example, 24 Hr Ballad (2013), included in When The Stars Begin to Fall, asked performers to respond to the folk song “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.”
Conceived and directed by Alexandro Segade and Amy Ruhl, Popular Revolt draws on the structure of Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstück, He Said Yes / He Said No, (1930) — a play with outcomes decided by the audience — updating the formula by using the logic of interactive video games and online sensitivity training modules.
Commissioned by NYU Skirball Center in 2018, Courtesy the Artists: Popular Revolt featured Miguel Gutierrez, Latasha N. Nevada Diggs, Ryan McNamara, Seung-Min Lee, Alison Kizu-Blair and Malik Gaines. Popular Revolt was performed in REDCAT’s New Original Works Festival, 2019, with Sophia Le Fraga, Vishal Jugdeo, and Amira Nader.