Chris Vargas and MOTHA featured in Artforum
Image: View of “Queer California: Untold Stories,” 2019, Oakland Museum of California. From MOTHA’s exhibition series “Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects,” 2015–19. Photo: Palmer Rose.
Associate Professor of Time-Based Art Chris Vargas appears in the September 2021 issue of Artforum in Julia Bryan-Wilson's feature on queer and trans artists’ museums.
Vargas founded the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art (MOTHA) in 2013, releasing a poster declaring the museum was "coming soon!" But, Bryan-Wilson states:
"...the physical arrival of the institution was never the point: Though there have been some iterations with actual objects on display, notably in the Oakland Museum of California’s 2019 exhibition 'Queer California: Untold Stories,' the 'forever under construction' (that is to say, largely immaterial, ephemeral, and unconsolidated) MOTHA is better understood as a conceptual project that lives not in a building but in people’s heads as a space of fantasy and projection."
