Founded in 2000 in Los Angeles, My Barbarian is the umbrella for works collaboratively created by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade. Their collective work uses performance to explore social difficulties, often re-framing Marxist, feminist, queer theory, pop culture, and classics through playful, campy intervention. The resulting plays, masks, videos, drawings, songs, installations, texts, events, puppets, and paintings reflect both a serious inclination to academic research as well as an ongoing interest in critically re-assessing the reception and appropriation of these ideas and their hegemonizing forces in the sphere of the avant-garde, academia, and culture at large.
The video Universal Declaration of Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Creative Impulse (2013), one of their most well-known works, premiered at Vielmetter Los Angeles in 2013. In addition to this video, the exhibition included a live theatrical performance of the same name and objects that explored feminist legacies, the symbolism of a maternal order, first loves, and the group’s negotiations as daughters, sons, students, teachers, and working mothers. The exhibition title combined the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” which was co-authored by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1948, and Melanie Klein’s 1929 essay “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and the Creative Impulse.” Using these and other influential texts, My Barbarian traced the modernist precedents for their work along a maternal line. Several of these works were later re-presented in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
My Barbarian consists of Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade. Gaines was born in Visalia, CA, in 1973, lives and works in Los Angeles and San Diego, received their PhD from UCLA in 2011, their MFA from CalArts in 1999, and their BA from UCLA in 1996. Gordon was born in Santa Rosa, CA, in 1975, lives and works in Los Angeles, and received their MA in 2011 and BA in 2008 from USC in Los Angeles. Segade was born in San Diego, CA, in 1973, lives and works in Los Angeles and San Diego, and received their MFA and BA from UCLA.
Recent solo exhibitions include Maskworkers, Vielmetter Los Angeles (2023); My Barbarian, traveling exhibition at ICALA, Los Angeles (2022) and Whitney Museum of Art, New York (2021); The Audience is Always Right, New Museum, New York (2016); Universal Declaration of Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Creative Impulse, University of Illinois, Chicago (2014) among many others. Group exhibitions include Ridykes’ Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2023); Are We Not Drawn Onward to a New Era, Mandeville Gallery, UCSD, San Diego, CA (2023); Picturing Motherhood Now: Images for a New Era, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (2021); One day this kid will get larger, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago (2017); and the Whitney Biennale, Witney Museum of Art, New York (2014), among many others.
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Selected Solo and Two Person Exhibitions
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Selected Group Exhibitions
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Bibliography
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Selected Projects
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Awards, Grants and Fellowships
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Performances
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Group Exhibition Catalogues and Books
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