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Xandra Ibarra

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Xandra Ibarra
BornJuly 9, 1979 (age 37)
El Paso/ Juarez border
NationalityMexican American
OccupationPerformance Artist
Websitehttp://www.xandraibarra.com

Xandra Ibarra (born July 9, 1979), who uses the alias "La Chica Boom", is a queer, Chicana performance artist based in Oakland, California.[1] She is from the El Paso, Juarez border and uses her performance art to bring awareness to the stigmatization of Latinx culture and iconography.[1] Ibarra works to dismantle stigmatization around expressions of queer sexuality, as well as call attention to the sexual stereotypes of Latina women through performance.[2] Artforum recognized Ibarra’s performance Nude Laughing along with her photo series “Spic Ecdysis” as best in performance in 2016.[3]

Art and Performance

Spictacles

Ibarra has presented hundreds of “spictacles” under the stage persona La Chica Boom since 2002. Spictacles, a term coined by Ibarra, are embodied displays that tap into problematic myths around the Mexican identity and destabilize them by making them seem absurd.[4] One example of such a performance is La Tortillera, exhibited in 2004.[4] In this performance, the artist calls attention to the sexualization of Latina labor as she wears traditional Mexican tortillera attire while making tortillas. La Chica Boom strips away articles of clothing until she is only wearing pasties and a strap on with a Tapatio bottle attached to it.[4] Finally, she mock ejaculates the hot sauce onto the homemade tortilla before consuming it, representing the internalization process of stereotypes. This performance explores how ideas of consumption relate to both “authentic” Mexican food and Mexican women’s sexuality.[4]

Nude Laughing

Xandra Ibarra performed Nude Laughing at the Eli Broad Museum in Los Angeles in 2016, where she walked nude through the museum, dragging a nylon sac of stereotypical "white lady" items.[5] Through this performance, Ibarra uses nudity to explore ties between bodies, "whiteness", and womanhood.[5] The piece is drawn from John Currin's 1998 painting titled "Laughing Nude," which features a nude white woman with her face caught in the middle of maniacal laughter that blurs the erotic with the grotesque.[5] In an email to The Huffington Post, Ibarra explains, "I want to capture what I can of these white nudes in my brown figure and skin and enact a union between sound and gesture that can't be captured within a painting."[5] She aims to bring the nudes to life in what she describes as the "wrong" body, enhancing the grotesque, tactile, and expressive dimensions of how she imagines white womanhood.[5]

Untitled Fucking (A Collaboration)

The 2013 video, Untitled Fucking, is a performance by Xandra Ibarra and Amber Hawk Swanson where the women, dressed in lingerie, engage in many sexual interactions.[2] This video explores the stigmatization of sexuality within the feminist movement, as well as issues around inter-racial sexual experience.[2] It is part of a larger set of works on feminism, created by Hawk Swanson titled, “The Feminism? Project.”[2]

Spic Ecdysis

The ongoing photo series from 2014-2015, captures Ibarra’s symbolic process of shedding the skin of a cockroach.[3] By comparing herself to a cockroach, Ibarra brings up issues of how the Latinx community are often seen as an unwanted presence in the U.S.[3] She says in her explanation, "Even when I attempt to reassemble new skin, sick of my spic casings, I remain destined to be crucified through them."[3]

Activism

Ibarra is a community organizer, working within immigrant rights, 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 interpersonal and state violence.[6]

Significance

Venues and Exhibits

Xandra Ibarra's performance work has been featured internationally in a wide range of venues, including, the Eli Broad Museum, the De Young Museum, Galeria de la Raza, CounterPulse performance venue in San Francisco, Asian Art Museum, the SOMArts Cultural Center (supported by the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San Francisco Foundation), El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Popa Gallery (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Joe's Pub, PPOW Gallery (NYC), and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts[7][8][9][6]

Grants and Awards

Among her numerous awards are the Art Matters Grant, National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Award, the Fund for the Arts, ReGen Artist Fund, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Away Award, Theater Bay Area Grant and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award.[6]

Features in Academic Publications

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings

Juana María Rodríguez, is a professor of Performance Studies and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.[10] She writes about Xandra Ibarra’s performance on sexual violence at the U.S./ Mexican border.[10] In the performance, a border patrol agent violates La Chica Boom by spanking her and stripping off her clothes.[10] Rodriguez includes Ibarra’s performance in the academic discussion of how to use performance as a way to cope with sexual violence and pain.[10]

Spic(y) Appropriations: The Gustatory Aesthetics of Xandra Ibarra (aka La Chica Boom) 

Ivan Ramos, an academic with a Ph.D. in Performance Studies, from University of California, Berkeley writes about La Chica Boom’s performances ‘Ecdysis: The Molting of a Cucarachica,’ Dominatrix del Barrio, Virgensota Jota, Tortillera and Untitled Fucking.[4] He discusses Ibarra’s incorporation of the symbolic Tapatio bottle across many of her performances.[4] Ramos discusses how this calls attention to the history of denigration of Mexicans, carried out through the harsh criticisms of the spiciness of Mexican cuisine.[4] Ramos writes about the ways La Chica Boom appropriates and plays with the stereotypes of Mexicans as unsanitary, obnoxiously flavorful, and over sexualized, in order to dismantle them.[4] The author mentions how this work is similar to the Chicana/o art collective founded in the 1960s, ASCO, because they also use artwork to fight against racial prejudice.[4]

Press

Xandra Ibarra has been featured in many newspapers and magazines, most notably, The Huffington Post, KQED Arts, San Francisco Bay Guardian and SF Weekly.[5][11][12][13]

References

  1. ^ a b Patel, Alpesh Kantilal.“La Chica Boom's Failed Decolonial Spictacles.”HemisphericInstitute, 2014, hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/emisferica-111-decolonial-gesture/patel. Accessed February 5, 2017.
  2. ^ a b c d Rodriguez, Juana Maria."Bocados." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 21 no. 1, 2015, pp. 5-5. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/566787. Accessed 10 Feb. 2017.
  3. ^ a b c d Campbell, Andy. “The Year in Performance.” Artforum: Artforum International Magazine, Dec. 2016, www.xandraibarra.com/artforum2016/. Accessed 22 Mar 2017.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i Ramos, Ivan. “Spic(y) Appropriation: The Gustatory Aesthetics of Xandra Ibarra (aka La Chica Boom).”ARARA- Art and Architecture in the Americas, no. 12, 2016 pp.1-18. www.essex.ac.uk/arthistory/research/pdfs/arara-issue-12/2.%20Spic(y)%20Appropriations.Ivan%20Ramos.pp.1-18.pdf. Accessed February 5, 2017.
  5. ^ a b c d e f Tongco, Tricia (2016-04-08). "Artist's 'Nude Laughing' Exposes Much More Than Skin (NSFW)". The Huffington Post. Retrieved 2017-03-04.
  6. ^ a b c "Xandra Ibarra CODAME ART+TECH". codame.com. Retrieved 2017-03-05.
  7. ^ "The Broad". www.thebroad.org. Retrieved 2017-03-04.
  8. ^ "Live Performance: featuring DavEnd and Xandra Ibarra". de Young. 2014-10-30. Retrieved 2017-03-04.
  9. ^ B, Marke (2015-07-29). "La Chica Boom explodes herself (almost)". 48 hills. Retrieved 2017-03-04.
  10. ^ a b c d Rodríguez, Juana María. “Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies.” Duke University Press: GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies, vol. 17, no. 2/3, pp. 331-348, 2009, muse.jhu.edu/article/437415/pdf. Accessed 16 Feb. 2017.
  11. ^ Harrison Tedford, Matthew. “Xandra Ibarra Parodies Stereotypes with Playful Burlesque.” KQED Arts, 21 Aug. 2015, ww2.kqed.org/arts/2015/08/21/xandra-ibarras-burlesque-and-performance-art-challenge-stereotypes/. Accessed 29 April 2017.
  12. ^ Avila, Robert. “Gorgeousness unbound.” SF Bay Guardian, 15 Jul. 2014,unbound///48hills.org/sfbgarchive/2014/07/15/gorgeousness-unbound/. Accessed 29 April 2017.  
  13. ^ Curiel, Jonathan. “Art: We are at the Center if the Universe.” SF Weekly, 20 April 2016, archives.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/art-were-the-center-of-the-universe-black-and-white-projects-issued-id-minority-as-brand-home-improvements-curated-by-john-waters-mcna/Content?oid=4627091. Accessed 29 April 2017.
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