Continue playing
(Time remaining: )
Play from beginning
Continue playing "{{ controller.videos[controller.getVideo(controller.currentVideo)].segmentParentTitle}}"
{{controller.videos[controller.getVideo(controller.currentVideo)].title}} has ended.
Radical TransparencyPuppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo)
Amidst a sea of green, artist Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) lies in her bedroom: each instance of chartreuse, lime, moss, or jade echoing the artist’s name across the room. For her New Museum, New York exhibition Nothing New (2023-2024), the artist replicated her green bedroom in the museum and lived there during the run of the exhibition, making her most private space public. On either side of her replica bedroom, the artist built installations that reflect both places from her past as well as imagined futures: a Zen garden on one end and six potted marijuana plants on the other. “It really feels like a full universe that I’m trying to convey,” says Kuriki-Olivo. “With trans women, in their bedrooms, dreaming up their futures, and possibilities.” In this documentary short, Art21 follows Kuriki-Olivo and her collaborators as they move between the real and the performed, capturing what happens when an artist turns their life into an artwork.
Early in the artist’s practice, her work engaged pop-cultural figures in performances alongside readymade sculptures and installations in galleries, obliquely addressing both the artist’s personal life as well as her social and cultural concerns. While working at The TransLatin@ Coalition, a nonprofit serving transgender, gender non-conforming, and intersex individuals, Kuriki-Olivo began to consider how she could integrate her artistic practice and her social work. The resulting exhibitions facilitated services like free HIV testing and forefronted transgender and queer experiences.
Now in her replica bedroom at the New Museum, the artist is exposed to the curious gazes of museumgoers through a glass wall separating the installation and the museum lobby, mirroring the hypervisibility and surveillance of transgender people in daily life. However, Kuriki-Olivo takes control of her visibility in Nothing New through alternating gestures of denial and generosity. One tool is what the artist calls “the power,” a button that allows her to quickly fog and defog the glass, hiding and revealing herself at will. In addition, Kuriki-Olivo invited others to share the space and organized an evening of performance at the museum, giving greater visibility to her collaborators like Lexii’Foxx and Alethia Israel Ramos (AiR) from the House of Transcendence. Reflecting on how her life has transformed since she was a child in Dallas, Texas, the artist shares how her relationship to performance has changed, no longer a tool for hiding but instead a space to embrace who she really is.
More information and creditsCredits
Director & Producer: Drew de Pinto. Executive Producer: Tina Kukielski. Series Producer: Nick Ravich. Associate Producer: Andrea Chung. Editor: Drew de Pinto. Cinematography: Riley Nightingale. Additional Cinematography: Meicen Meng. Sound: Ana Fernández. Assistant Curator: Jurrell Lewis. Additional Footage: The New Museum. Color: Marika Litz. Sound Mix: Collin Blendell. Music: Density & Time, Kelsey Lu, Yehezkel Raz. Design & Graphics: Chips.
Thanks: Vivian Crockett, Joe Fusaro, Julia Lee, Lexii-Foxx, Antoneil Lyne, Sarah Morris, Tevin Powell, Alethia Israel Ramos
Artwork Courtesy: Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo). Archival Courtesy: Stefan Burger, Blaine Campbell, Fred Dott, Galerie Francesca Pia, Dario Lasagni, Caroline Minjolle, Cedric Mussano, Trautwein Herleth, Whitney Museum of American Art, Mason Wilson, Jens Ziehe
Art21 Staff: Makda Amdetsyon, Lauren Barnett, Hannah DeGarmo, Lolita Fierro, lan Forster, Grace LeCates, Emma Nordin, Jessica Svenson, Noor Tamari, Nora Wimmer.
New York Close Up is made possible with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Every Page Foundation, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, the Henry Nias Foundation, and individual contributors.
Closed captions
Through the Art21 Translation Project, multilingual audiences from around the globe can contribute translations, making Art21 films more accessible worldwide.
Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) was born in 1989 in Dallas, TX, and currently lives and works in New York City. The artist received her BA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2014. Kuriki-Olivo’s work is rooted in a conceptual practice that takes many forms including performances, installations, sculptures, drawings, paintings, and community organizing. The artist’s work questions standard notions of what is and isn’t art, blurs lines between the personal and public, and explores the performance of identity as it’s mediated through the commodities and media we consume and surround ourselves with.
“It really feels like a full universe that I’m trying to convey of trans women in their bedroom dreaming up their future and possibilities, and maybe even possibilities if the world wasn’t the way that it was.”
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo)