photo: Matt Grubb
Xandro Segade is an interdisciplinary artist whose queer world-building projects propose speculative group identities. Often working in collectives, Segade makes spaces for critical play, using collaboration to complicate utopian impulses with radical ambivalence. Segade’s practice traces connections across performance, writing and drawing, making video, installation, theater, sculpture, music, costumes and comics that defy genre distinctions, subverting contextual frameworks, disrupting the political imagination.
Segade’s multimedia science fiction performance series set in the queer dystopia Clonifornia include “Future St.,” published by Yale Theater Journal in 2017, “Replicant Vs. Separatist,” and “Boy Band Audition," have been presented at the Park Avenue Armory, Judson Church, NYC; Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College; Time-Based Art Festival, Portland, Oregon; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; and LAXART, REDCAT, the Broad Museum in LA. Segade’s graphic novel, The Context, (Primary Information, 2020) was the subject of a virtual convention hosted simultaneously by Participant Inc, NY and Human Resources, LA; his comics have appeared in issues of Artforum and commissioned by Creative Time. Segade’s rwriting on over-looked artists of the AIDS era, feminist performance art, the intersectionality of LatinX representation, and the political imagination of fan culture has been published in Artforum, Keywords for Comics Studies (NYU Press, 2021), Comic Velocity: HIV and AIDS in Comics (Visual AIDS 2021) and Queer, Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art (MIT Press 2016). Segade’s queer comics podcast, Supergay!, ran for 50 episodes from 2017-2021.
Segade has collaborated for decades with Malik Gaines, on live performance art, theater, music and exhibitions. Their work with Jade Gordon as the collective My Barbarian, founded in 2000, has been the recent subject of a survey exhibition and performance program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a monograph published by the Whitney Museum and Yale University Press. The group’s work has been presented at LACMA, The Hammer Museum, REDCAT, SFMOMA, MoMA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Kitchen, The New Museum, Participant Inc. and many other U.S. venues; and internationally at Museo El Eco, Mexico City; DeAppel, Amsterdam; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; The Power Plant, Toronto; El Matadero, Madrid, and others. They were included in two Performa Biennials, the Whitney Biennial, two California Biennials, the Montreal Biennial, and the Baltic Triennial. My Barbarian has been supported by USA Artists, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Mike Kelly Foundation, Art Matters, the City of LA Cultural Affairs, and others. According to Catherine Quan Damman, in Artforum, My Barbarian bring “high-theory arcana into bawdy populist forms, marshaling their multicultural demographics to burlesque liberal fantasies of the melting pot, and vamping the world historical only to burn it down and throw a party around the flames.” Their work has been written about in many scholarly publications, including Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by Jose Muñoz, who described their performance as “queer virtuosity.”
Other collaborative projects include Star Choir, a science fiction opera, co-written and directed by Segade, commissioned by Clockshop for the exhibition Radio Imagination: Artists and Writers in the Archives of Octavia E. Butler, and performed at the Park Avenue Armory in NYC and in production with LA-based experimental opera company, The Industry. The collective A.R.M (Alexandro Segade, Robbie Acklen, Malik Gaines) uses photography and performance to re-enact gay history and cultural forms, with performances and exhibitions at at the Whitney Museum and The High Line, in NYC; Espacio Odeon in Bogota, Colombia, DD55 Gallery in Cologne, Germany, and Rogaland Kunstcenter in Stavanger, Norway. Segade has also co-directed projects NYC-based collective Courtesy the Artists, in collaboration with LaTasha Diggs, Miguel Gutierrez, Matana Roberts, Amy Ruhl and others, at MoMAPS1, Recess Projects, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Kitchen and NYU Skirball, NYC. Segade collaborated with Wu Tsang on the short film Mishima in Mexico (2012) for which the duo received an Art Matters Grant, and the performance Guilt for Shame at Artist’s Space, NYC. Segade performed in Simone Forti’s Seesaw in Judson Dance Theater: The work is Never Done, MoMA, NYC, and Jordan Strafer’s film Peak Heaven Love Forever (2021).
Alexandro Segade is assistant professor of art at UCSD. Segade served as cochair of Film/Video at Bard College MFA from 2014-2020, was a distinguished lecturer in New Genres at Hunter College, and has taught at Parsons, The New School, Cooper Union, Columbia, NYC; and University of Southern California, LA. He holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art at UCLA.