Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art poster. Courtesy of the artist
A full year before Time Magazine published it’s June 2014 “Transgender Tipping Point” cover featuring actress Laverne Cox tip-toeing forward in a cyan colored dress, artist Chris Vargas created the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art. MOTHA is an imaginary museum that aims to collect and archive objects and ephemeral representations of a visual history that encompasses the contemporary and little-known narratives of trans people. One museum project that seeks to institutionally document trans histories and micro-histories is the museum’s ever expanding Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects collection, currently on view at the Henry Art Gallery.
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Potential objects to be included in MOTHA’s book, Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects. Courtesy of the artist.
“I originally designed this poster which basically features 200 trans and gender nonconforming, real and fictional, figures,” for the ad announcing the museum, explains Chris Vargas, MOTHA's founder and executive director. “I put out a call and asked people to send me their trans or gender heroes and over the course of a year I assembled this giant collage.” He says, “I wanted to suggest this possible place that didn’t quite exist, so I created the branding around MOTHA. I just imagined the poster and started to put it out in the world as a perpetual coming soon. Just to spark the imagination of people and have them start thinking about the institutional form this sort of thing take,” the artist explains. “What would a hirstory and art museum dedicated to gender nonconforming people be?”
99 Objects is inspired by the Smithsonian book American History in 101 Objects, itself a take on the BBC and British Museum’s A History of the World in 100 Objects. 99 Objects at the Henry Museum is the second iteration of Vargas’ ongoing exhibition series. The first, Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects: Legends and Mythologies, included works by nine artists as well as historical documents and artifacts that broadly traced themes of activism and grief. The Henry show uses archival materials and artworks to focus on the history of the Pacific Northwest trans community. It includes artist micha cárdenas' video, Pregnancy, which includes a description of how it feels to undergo undergo assisted reproduction for trans women. “My body is foreign to me/it’s changing, in ways I don’t like,” reads one verse of text in the video. The exhibition also includes documentation of the rock opera performance Transfused, and Jono Vaughan's Project 42, a performance series that memorializes victims of transgender murders.
In Vargas’ museum proposal exists a contradiction in trying to “make a pretty slippery identity category more stable” by displaying their histories and objects inside institutions of legitimacy and power. How does a museum mine stories and artifacts of trans and gender nonconforming people, or those who lived lives “passing” as members of their desired gender? Vargas’ conceptual museum is a challenge to actual institutions to move “toward a museum of the 21st century,” as art critic Holland Cotter describes the need for warehouses of culture to provide curators the opportunities. It's an effort, for instance, to correct the historic erasure of trans folk from art and history, and provide, in physical space, possibilities for future fluidity in representation. The challenge for museums is to create context out of no context—to make themselves “porous” containers that can capture the unfixing and reconstructing of identity.
Documentation of Jono Vaughan’s Mia D’Avanza, 4800 West Jackson Blvd, Chicago, IL (from Project 42). 2013. Performance with customized fabric sewn by the artist. Still image courtesy of the artist.
“It’s really a critical archive project,” explains Vargas. “It looks at an under-historicized community. It looks critically at how history is made, while trying to pay homage to the little known histories of trans rebellion, or trans cultural figures throughout history that are important and who have shifted the dialogue in various ways.” He notes, “It also points to trans scholarship around these histories and the problems around the shift in language. What people call transgender today wouldn’t necessarily be called that 30 years ago.” He says, “As a larger goal, I want the fact that queer, trans, non-conforming people have existed throughout history in various forms. We always existed.”
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