XANDRA IBARRA

XANDRA IBARRA is an artist working in performance, video, and sculpture. She has lectured, taught, and exhibited over many years, developing a strong art practice prior to earning her MFA at UC Berkeley in 2020. Xandra is also a longtime community organizer devoted to addressing violence against women and transgender people of color. She created a hyper-sexualized, hyper-racialized persona known as La Chica Boom for a performance series in the 2000s aiming in part to humorously complicate and pervert Mexican iconography. Xandra’s work draws on sexual subcultures, infusing them with humor to contend with racism and homophobia. Currently, Xandra is a recipient of a 2020 Graduate Fellowship Award at Headlands Center for the Arts.

Strobelite Honeys are inspired by women from brown and black exploitation films and ‘90s rave culture from the El Paso–Juarez region from which Xandra originally hails. Incorporating “cheap” materials such as gypsum plaster, costume jewelry, and repurposed fur coats, the works are anthropomorphic sculptures with an adult nightlife, party/after-the-party narrative.

Ass Tassels highlights the artist’s obsession with cars. Xandra spent hours combing through junkyards in the East Bay looking for tail lights from vintage cars. Using the tail light casings as molds, she casts plaster sculptures and then photographs them on a red background. The red background color references a stop sign as well as the brake lights themselves.

Q&A WITH XANDRA

BAC: On our call you mentioned your former life as a performer. Can you tell us how your performance persona influenced the work you made at UC Berkeley – specifically Strobelite Honeys and Ass Tassels? 

Xandra: Since the early 2000s, I performed in various sexual subcultures, specifically within BDSM, nightlife, and cabaret communities on the West Coast. From 2002–2012, I performed under the moniker of La Chica Boom and made works called “spictacles” that used spectacle as form. I suppose I also used the stereotype as form, since I used the burlesque format to embody and parody my own racial and sexual abjection.

My current work in sculpture builds on this previous performance research and draws inspiration from these sexual subcultures and my academic work in Ethnic Studies. In my sculptural work, I often use pasties, piercings, tassels, wigs, makeup, costume jewelry, leather, sex toys, and other ephemera as material, along with a range of found materials and casts made of gypsum. Strobelite Honeys (2019) use an array of these materials — metal nipple pasties and piercings, the costume jewelry, the cigarettes, and those cheap fur coats often worn by nightlife divas. Ass Tassels (2018) brings together car taillights and performer tassels, inviting the viewer to associate the human body with the auto body. 

My sculpture materials are often the same materials I use in performance. I use these materials to contend with pleasure while also conceptually trying to trace the fuckery of being a minoritarian subject, aka living in degradation. My hope is to humorously and defiantly reimagine the aesthetic and affective dimensions of difference. I want to open up sites of pleasure even as I consider the conditions that constrain racialized subjects’ everyday lives. There is pleasure and desire there, it lives inside these tight, violent, and harmful positions. I want to stay there for a while and see what happens.

BAC: There is so much to be pissed off about right now, and as an artist and activist you confront many issues with your work. Can you talk about the intersection of art and activism for you and your work?

Xandra: During the time I was performing as La Chica Boom, I was organizing within immigrant justice, anti-rape/domestic violence, and prison abolition movements through a national radical feminist of color organization called INCITE! However, my artwork did not respond directly to my political commitments; instead I made work that lingered in the problems of an overdetermined/knowable Latinidad, and I often inhabited or explored issues of colonialism and whiteness. In my artwork, I was not, and I continue to not be, interested in decolonizing nor thwarting away or resisting against such forms of power. Instead, my art practice lingers in its resonances to find other ways of being. I am not saying that colonialism, racism, sexism, or ableism are catalysts for my creativity, but that finding desire and pleasure inside these constraints is a catalyst for making/living. 

BAC: Congratulations on your Graduate Fellowship Award at Headlands Center for the Arts. Can you tell us what you are working on there and do you have any images of works in progress to share?

Xandra: While at Headlands, I’m building work in response to the Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose archive located at the One Archives in Los Ángeles. Anchored in an artistic study of Flanagan and Rose’s canonical performances exploring sadism, masochism, pleasure, illness, and disability in Los Angeles in the 1980s and ’90s, I will construct various sculptures that combine wheelchair parts with Mexican leather tooling and upholstery.

ARTIST BIO

Xandra Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Broad Museum (LA), ExTeresa Arte Actual (DF, Mexico), The Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC), and Anderson Collection (Stanford), among others. Recent residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts, Open Space SFMOMA (Columnist in Residence), Marble House Project, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, National Performance Network, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. 

Ibarra has been awarded the Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship, Queer Art Prize for Recent Work, Art Matters Grant, NALAC Fund for the Arts, Eisner Film and Video Prize, Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Paper Magazine, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, ArtNews, and in various academic journals nationally and internationally. 

Ibarra’s work has also been featured in several recent and forthcoming books. An excerpt from her panel presentation at the New Museum, “Exhibitionist Tendencies: The Past and Present of Sexuality, Gender, and Race in Art” is included in the book Saturation: Race, Art & the Circulation of Value edited by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp. Juana Maria Rodriguez’s Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings features her performance “I am your Puppet” (2007) and Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance includes a chapter about Ibarra’s collaboration with performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson, “Untitled Fucking” (2013). Leticia Alvarado’s Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production features Ibarra’s performance work “Skins/Less Here” (2015) on the cover and within the book.

Ibarra is currently a member of Survived and Punished California. As a lecturer, she has taught Ethnic Studies, Sexuality Studies, and History and Theory of Contemporary Art courses. Adjunct and part-time teaching posts have included: San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, and San Francisco State University. Ibarra holds an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University. She attended the Post-Colonial Studies program held at Universidat Rovira | Virgili (Spain).

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