Award-winning artist, punk performer, acclaimed author, and international blacktress Vaginal Davis has visited Stockholm. In collaboration with Moderna Museet, the Nationalmuseum presented an installation of Vaginal Davis’s work in The Old Library, evoking her life-long interest in the mystical tales of the wizards and witches of Oz. Additionally, a selection of Vaginal Davis’s iconic paintings were on display in the adjacent 19th-century collection gallery.
Welcome to the wondrous world of Vaginal Davis. In this “magnificent product”, which unfolds at Moderna Museet and other art institutions in Stockholm, you are invited to see Ms. Davis’s expansive practice from all angles.
Once upon a time, in the far-eastern part of Los Angeles, a little girl was born. Her name was Vaginal. She was a child prodigy: she could read when she was two, soon learned to speak five languages including Assyrian, graced the stage of numerous elementary school theatres, enrolled in the local genius honours program, and, at the tender age of eight years, mounted her first exhibition at the Los Angeles Public Library: a radical rethinking of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Inspired by the militancy of the Black Panthers in the United States, Vaginal named herself after Angela Davis—forever cementing her name in the annals of history: Vaginal Davis.
Only recently, archaeologist and artist Jonathan Berger uncovered Vaginal Davis’s installation Naked on my Ozgoad from the ruins of Ms. Davis’s former palace in Ramona Gardens, Los Angeles. In response, Ms. Davis spawned “Middle Sex”: her mesmerizing magnum opus, the queen of all zines, a 500-page book in which she collages text, found photos, and drawings with her personal eclectic archive of 30-plus-years, to, in her own words, “open the doors to realms and possibilities never before imagined in one supersized, precariously unhinged volume.” In the zine “Middle Sex,” Vaginal Davis orientates the mythos behind L. Frank Baum’s Fairyland of Oz and triggers something new and quirky from it. “Middle Sex” was the epicenter of a collection of sculptures, sound works, and hieroglyphic drawings on the walls of The Old Library at the Nationalmuseum.
Nearby, a selection of paintings by Vaginal Davis graced the turquoise walls of the 19th-century gallery. Ms. Davis’s paintings of “women trapped in the bodies of women” evoke a longer art history of icon painting, originating in the damp fortresses of 11th-century Byzantium and practiced to this day by Vaginal Davis on the idyllic Rote Insel in Berlin. The paintings also showed the queer networks and friendships that exist in her practice, both factual and fictional, Biblical and Platonic, in time and over time. Such relationships are mirrored in the display opposite of Vaginal Davis’s paintings, which honors friendships between female and queer artists at the turn of the century. Which century?
Vaginal Davis, Drawings on a wall in the Old library. 2024. Photo: My Matson, Moderna Museet.
Vaginal Davis, Proffesor Wogglebug. Photo: My Matson, Moderna Museet.
Vaginal Davis, Middle Sex. Bound book. 2024. Photo: My Matson, Moderna Museet.
Vaginal Davis, Right: Mamba's Daughter Fredi Washington 2017. Left: Susan Kohner - Imitation of Life, 2017.
Vaginal Davis, Middle Sex, 2024, excerpt. Courtesy of the artist
Vaginal Davis, Diz McNally Out of Control, 2021,mixed media, 17 x 12 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
Vaginal Davis, Susan Kohner-Imitation of Life, mixed media, 14 x 8.6 cm. Private collection, New York, USA
Vaginal Davis, Zora Neale Hurston, 2020, mixed media, 25 x 15 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
Vaginal Davis. Foto: Hector Martinez
Credits
Vaginal Davis: Naked on my Ozgoad, by Vaginal Davis, in collaboration with Jonathan Berger. The exhibition was organized by Hendrik Folkerts (Curator of International Contemporary Art, Moderna Museet), in close collaboration with and Eva-Lena Bergström and Carina Rech (both Nationalmuseum).
With contributions from Richard Gabriel Gersch, Salome Gersch, Hands On Press, Kathleen Hanna, Daniel Hendrickson, Adam Horovitz, Ricardo Montez, Miss Joan Marie Moossy, Maria Norrman, Uzi Parnes, Susanne Sachsse, Angela Seo, Carmelita Tropicana, Ela Troyano.