Guillermo Gómez-Peña has an obsession with rewriting and re-staging so-called “Western Art History” while highlighting colonial legacies of systematic exclusion, demonization and fetishization of Brown, Black, and indigenous bodies.
This video keynote from Gómez-Peña challenges contemporary art museum practices and calls for an open discussion regarding radical restructuring from within. The keynote is part of Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files: Audio Art & Strange Poetry from the US/Mexico Border, a year-long series of experimental audio performances presented by Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Public Media Institute, and the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art as part of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40. Later in the series, Gómez-Peña will be joined by invited luminaries in the field who will offer their own responses to the Museum of the Future.
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Guillermo Gómez-Peña, photo by Zen Cohen. Courtesy of the artist.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Mexico City, 1968) is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and artistic director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978, and since 1995, his three homes have been San Francisco, Mexico City and the “road.” His performance work and 21 books have contributed to the debates on cultural, generational, and gender diversity, border culture and North-South relations. Gómez-Peña art work has been presented at more than one thousand venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, USA Artists Fellow, and a Bessie, Guggenheim, and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe. Gómez-Peña is currently a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency, and a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. For Gómez-Peña’s archive of performance visit guillermogomezpena.com.
