TextaQueen

Bio

TextaQueen (b. 1975) is a multi-genre artist of Goan descent living on unceded Wurundjeri land. Known for using the humble felt-tip marker to create majestic portraiture, their work complicates assumptions around identities at the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and ability. Their practice envisions an ever-expanding alternate universe of collective and transformative possibility, centring those not often witnessed in states of empowerment. Encompassing drawing, painting, printmaking, video, performance, curating, music, writing and murals—in collaboration with other displaced and diasporic people—they deliver irreverent satire in enticing colour and detail that disrupts all the “isms” entrenched in the status quo. Texta contemplates dis/connection to cultural and colonial legacies, interrogating the many ways in which they find themselves precariously balanced across ancestral and stolen lands. TextaQueen’s work has appeared at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London; and Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany; and is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Monash University of Modern Art, Melbourne; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; and the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Mural commissions include de Young Museum, San Francisco; Murray Art Museum Albury, Albury; City of Moreland, Melbourne; and City of Melbourne. They have had mentorships with Emory Douglas and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashina in Oakland, California; a 2017 State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship; and residencies at ACME, London; International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; and QAGOMA. A mid-career survey exhibition toured nationally via Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery in 2017.

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