OUTsider, Queer Multi-Arts Festival and Conference,
Returns to Austin on February 17-21, 2016
Austin, TX — OUTsider, a mischievous non-profit queer multi-arts festival and conference, celebrating creative nonconformity and cross-disciplinary play, will take place February 17-21, 2016 in Austin, TX. OUTsider ventures into its second edition with a bold new theme: “Sex in Public.” Following the legalization of gay marriage, this theme promises an imaginatively “undomesticated” spectacle of multi-disciplinary art that puts the sex back in homosexuality, while friskily queering bodies, bedrooms and behaviors.
OUTsider will honor erotic icon and self-proclaimed “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle and her partner, ecological sex (“eco-sex”) artist Beth Stephens, with the second annual OUTsider Legacy Award. For the festivities, Sprinkle and Stephens will deliver a performative lecture on their sinsational work, spanning porn, performance, activism and visual art. This lecture will be followed by an ECOSEX WALKING TOUR: Sprinkle and Stephen’s guided tour of the ecosexy sites of Manor Road, inviting audience members to experience the fun as they shift the metaphor from “Earth as mother,” to “Earth as lover!,” learning 25 ways to make love to the Earth, finding the e-spot and exploring the eroticism of nature through the senses.
“OUTsider is delighted to honor Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens with our 2016 Legacy Award,” states Curran Nault, OUTsider Artistic Director. “The playful daring and oddball charm of their work champions the same spirit that drives OUTsider. We’re tickled pink to have them here in Austin, sharing their boldly uncommon work with our festival audience.”
Opening Night of OUTsider 2016 will feature a glitter-tasseled array of burlesque, headlined by the electrifying Oakland-based artist La Chica Boom, who evokes hyper-raciality/sexuality/gender to arouse provocative questions about coloniality, compulsory whiteness and Mexicanidad. Opening Night will also witness the unveiling of this year’s Installation Centerpiece, THE NEW RULES OF FLAGGING, a multi- screen video installation and exhibition conceived and curated by Los Angeles garage-aesthetic artist Jonesy. FLAGGING pays interactive homage to the infamous “gay hanky code”: a color coded system of handkerchiefs used among gay male casual sex-seekers in the 1970s to indicate preferred sexual activities, fetishes and positions.
“La Chica Boom and Jonesy are two of the most provocative queer artists working today, particularly on matters of sex and sexuality,” says Nault. “La Chica Boom effectively wows audiences with her spectacular, bodily performances, while also managing to make them think deeply about race, politics and culture. And, Jonesy seduces audiences into sexy and surreal landscapes that allow them to experience the world anew. These two remarkable talents fearlessly embody this year’s ‘Sex in Public’ theme.”
OUTsider’s full festival program, sexy and otherwise, will be announced in early January, and will include everything from a multi-disciplinary art event exploring stories of queer Southern migration from diverse perspectives of gender, geography and race (Y’ALL COME BACK), to an early career retrospective of renowned Chicana performance artist, and famed WORK OF ART contestant, Nao Bustamante. OUTsider 2016 will also mark the return of the enormously popular academic-cum-artist series “Conference on the Couch,” featuring panels on such things as queer art and gentrification, the often thin line between art and porn, and much more.
Badges for OUTsider go on sale on Tuesday, November 17th, as part of a crowdfunding campaign on Generosity by Indiegogo. Aiming to raise $10,000 to cover the high costs associated with artist travel, lodging and operational fees for a DIY non-profit without corporate sponsors, OUTsider has enlisted the help of wacky “televangelist” duo Reverie and Randee—played by local performance artist Paul Soileau (CHRISTEENE) and filmmaker PJ Raval (BEFORE YOU KNOW IT). Reverie and Randee will release a series of wild videos in conjunction with the campaign, and will host a live telethon at the campaign’s end: Sunday, December 6th at Salvage Vanguard Theater (2803 E. Manor Road, Austin, TX). This telethon will also be broadcast live online.
HIGHLIGHTED ARTIST BIOS
Annie Sprinkle was a NYC prostitute and porn star for twenty years, then morphed into an artist and sexologist. She has passionately explored sexuality for over forty years, sharing her experiences through making her own unique brand of feminist sex films, writing books and articles, visual art making, creating theater performances, and teaching. Annie has consistently championed sex worker rights and health care and was one of the pivotal players of the Sex Positive Movement of the 1980’s. She got her BFA at School of Visual Arts in NYC was the first porn star to earn a Ph.D. She’s a popular lecturer whose work is studied in many colleges and Universities. For the past 12 years she has been collaborating on art projects with her partner, artist and UCSC professor, Elizabeth Stephens. They are movers and shakers in the new “ecosex movement,” committed to making environmentalism more sexy, fun and diverse. In 2013, Sprinkle proudly received the Artist/Activist/Scholar Award from Performance Studies International at Stanford, and was awarded the Acker Award for Excellence in the Avant Garde.
Elizabeth M. "Beth" Stephens is an American artist, sculptor, filmmaker, photographer, professor and former Chair of the Art Department at UC Santa Cruz. Stephens, who describes herself as "ecosexual", collaborates with her partner since 2002, ecosexual artist, radical sex educator, and performer Annie Sprinkle. In 2013, Stephens produced and directed Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story, a film addressing Mountaintop removal mining near her birthplace and its effects on the environment and nearby communities. Her work has been shown internationally, including at Museum Kunstpalast (Düsseldorf), El Ojo Atomico Antimuseo de Arte Contemporáneo (Spain) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Xandra Ibarra is an Oakland-based performance artist from the El Paso/Juarez border who performs and works under the alias of La Chica Boom. She uses hyper-raciality/sexuality/gender as an experience based mode of inquiry into her relationship with coloniality, compulsory whiteness and Mexicanidad. Ibarra uses video, objects, photography and sex acts to evoke comedic and melancholic racial and sexual expectation. Her aim is to amplify gendered and racialized iconography and make such problematic constructions via spectacle more transparent to the spectator—what she calls spictacles—camp spectacles of degeneracy and power. As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within immigrant, anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has actively participated in organizing with INCITE!, a national feminist of color organization dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of state and interpersonal violence. She currently organizes with FUSE, a national grassroots collective founded by sex workers of color. She lectures courses at San Francisco Art Institute and presents her academic and performance work at various bars, theaters, hole in the wall places, Universities and institutions. Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Popa Gallery (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Joe’s Pub (NYC), PPOW Gallery (NYC), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), and The Burlesque Hall of Fame (Las Vegas) to name a few.
Jonesy lives in Los Angeles. He studied photography and video at Tyler School of Art and while at Tyler fell under the spell of punk rock and started making music. In 2009 at Basso in Berlin, Germany, he did a collaborative multimedia installation and performance with former bandmates from the seminal San Francisco band Fagbash chronicling their rise as a band amidst the queer rock movement of the 1990's. Since 2008, he has been creating a series of animated short films that have screened internationally at the Oberhausen Film festival, the Toronto Film Festival, MIX NYC, aGLIFF, Outfest Los Angeles and others. Recent screenings and exhibitions have taken place at Yale University, the Hammer Museum, POPA Buenos Aires, an Outfest commissioned live piece in 2013 and the headline program at the Portland Experimental Film Festival. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Frieze, Art Review, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and X-tra magazine.
Nao Bustamante is a Chicana multimedia and performance artist, from the San Joaquin Valley in California, Her work largely explores issues of ethnicity, class, gender, performativity, and the body. She first trained in postmodern dance before moving into the realm of performance in the mid-1980s. She has been called "the doyenne of the Bay Area’s underground cultural scene.” She holds a BFA/MA from the San Francisco Art Institute and currently serves as Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sundance International Film Festival, Outfest International Film Festival, El Museo del Barrio Museum of Contemporary Art, First International Performance Biennial, Deformes in Santiago, Chile and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow. In 2014/15 Bustamante was the Queer Artist in Residence at UC Riverside and in 2015 she was a UC MEXUS Scholar in Residence preparing for a solo exhibit at Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles. Bustamante competed in the first season of Bravo's Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.
OUTSIDER INFORMATION
OUTsider is an Austin-based 501c(3) non-profit that celebrates the bold originality and creative nonconformity of the LGBTQI and Ally communities through the presentation of provocative, overlooked and out-of-the-box film, theater, dance, performance art, music, writing and visual art. Through its annual festival and conference, OUTsider brings together queer artists, audiences and scholars from around the globe to exchange ideas, ignite conversations, transcend boundaries and experience new pleasures through artistic discovery.
The second annual OUTsider will take place February 17-21, 2016 at the Salvage Vanguard Theater (2803 E. Manor Road, Austin, TX), as well as other venues on and around Manor Road in Austin.
Badges for the festival can be purchased through Generosity by Indiegogo: bit.ly/OUTsider2016.
Badges will be on discount, starting at $35 ($25 for students), until the end of the campaign: December 6, 2015. Badges grant access to all performances at the festival. Tickets for individual shows will be available at the festival on a case-by-case basis, pending seat availability.
OUTsider