Descriptions of Juliana are always hyphenated. She’s a lot of things—an artist, poet, performer, DJ, model, muse, trans icon, and member of the House of LaDosha. She’s also a mean cook and a gracious hostess. She’s the voice in my head I hear when I think “I’m spiraling” or “who is she?” And, at one in the morning, she’s the one to tell you where the after party is. Her intelligence is intimidating but she isn’t. She’s warm and magnetic. The timber of her voice is reassuring and her intonation musical. She brings a lot of people together.
Juliana’s work interrogates history, identity, and the way both are mediated. Some of her self-portraits reference the Colonial history of the United States, with a backdrop of ships and American and British Flags, and others, with her skin painted alien green, Nuwaubianism, the Black Muslim Sci-Fi religion. Her poetry is autobiographical at times, considering early digital personas on LiveJournal and Xanaga as well as Nintendo 64 avatars. “I always picked the girls when I played video games,” she writes, “If for no other reason, than out of sheer spite as the ease of identification the boys around me had with their un-interestingly phallic/kamehameha super-heroes.” At times, she weaves narratives other than her own, like imagining the motives of a graphic designer and anthropologist working on a children’s history book depicting early humans, contrasting office minutiae with the grander consequences of their color palette choices. For her MoMA performance this past Fall, “There are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed,”Juliana donned historical Cosplay and referenced the way versions of the past circulate in print and online, from academic papers to Assassin’s Creed III. Her work is savvy to the intersections of race and gender as well as to how digital technologies broaden and complicate these categories. She captures a sense of fantasy that at once punctures the illusions of history with a capital H, while making space for imagining alternative queer utopias. Photographer Dafy Hagai captures the artist in her studio.
Juliana Huxtable in the Studio
PUBLISHED IN ISSUE 15
PHOTOS BY DAFY HAGAI
WORDS BY WHITNEY MALLETT
Descriptions of Juliana are always hyphenated. She’s a lot of things—an artist, poet, performer, DJ, model, muse, trans icon, and member of the House of LaDosha. She’s also a mean cook and a gracious hostess. She’s the voice in my head I hear when I think “I’m spiraling” or “who is she?” And, at one in the morning, she’s the one to tell you where the after party is. Her intelligence is intimidating but she isn’t. She’s warm and magnetic. The timber of her voice is reassuring and her intonation musical. She brings a lot of people together.
Juliana’s work interrogates history, identity, and the way both are mediated. Some of her self-portraits reference the Colonial history of the United States, with a backdrop of ships and American and British Flags, and others, with her skin painted alien green, Nuwaubianism, the Black Muslim Sci-Fi religion. Her poetry is autobiographical at times, considering early digital personas on LiveJournal and Xanaga as well as Nintendo 64 avatars. “I always picked the girls when I played video games,” she writes, “If for no other reason, than out of sheer spite as the ease of identification the boys around me had with their un-interestingly phallic/kamehameha super-heroes.” At times, she weaves narratives other than her own, like imagining the motives of a graphic designer and anthropologist working on a children’s history book depicting early humans, contrasting office minutiae with the grander consequences of their color palette choices. For her MoMA performance this past Fall, “There are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed,”Juliana donned historical Cosplay and referenced the way versions of the past circulate in print and online, from academic papers to Assassin’s Creed III. Her work is savvy to the intersections of race and gender as well as to how digital technologies broaden and complicate these categories. She captures a sense of fantasy that at once punctures the illusions of history with a capital H, while making space for imagining alternative queer utopias. Photographer Dafy Hagai captures the artist in her studio.