This article is part of Hyperallergic‘s Pride Month Seriesfeaturing an interview with a different emerging transgender or non-binary artist each weekday throughout June.
We’re kicking off our Pride Month series with Judy Giera, a visual artist based in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Giera creates sculptural works in mixed media that she associates with the consumer styles of the 1990s (she even cites Lisa Frank as one of her biggest aesthetic influences). Giera also works as a collections manager at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in lower Manhattan. Below, she reflects on how the work she sees there and her daily experiences as a trans woman influence the art she creates.
Hyperallergic: What is the current orientation of your artistic practice?
Judy Giera: I am currently focusing on making mixed media paintings and wall sculptures in different scales and sizes. I embrace a theatrical sense of materiality, often harnessing various aspects of painting, drawing, sculpting, assemblage and DIY in my work. Using bright fluorescent, metallic or highly saturated colors, my work draws inspiration from the cheap capitalism of party supplies and dollar stores, as well as the pop culture aesthetics of the 1990s, early internet and what one might expect to see during an acid trip.
The work layers traditional art materials alongside inexpensive tchotchkes, everyday objects and personal ephemera in organic compositions often coated in glossy acrylic or epoxy resin. I like sticky, laminated artwork, like old toys or glittery packaging. I love when unique materials find their way into my work, like fake teeth, curling tape or needles used in hormone therapy, and I love when traditionally soft materials like fake hair, yarn , cloth, or tape are modified to be hard, inflexible, and impenetrable.
This material approach to storytelling in my work equates to how I move through the world as a trans woman: perhaps out of place and seemingly strange, but full of joy and vibrant in my own weird and wonderful beauty.
H: In what ways, if any, does your gender identity play a role in your experience as an artist?
JJ: As a trans woman, my navigation of the world is directly affected by the perceptions of my body and the inherent biases of the people I interact with. The constant performance of myself that I engage in to maintain my safety while affirming my femininity employs a variety of tactics – often a mixture of humor, redirection, excessive joy and madness – all serving as measures of resistance against violence and erasure.
Simultaneously, my relationship with my own body, the very thing that signals my trans personality, often shifts, oscillating between a sense of loving acceptance and nihilistic abjection. My practice transfigures this reality into the work I do. My work often alludes to the body without flatly representing it. As a trans woman, my body is seemingly everyone’s point of interest, I experience everything from invasive investigations to violent transgressions daily without my consent. I sublimate my trans body through form, color and symbol. I think the world seems to think they have enough access to my body as it is, in my art I have the power to decide how my body appears (if any), behaves and tells the story .
H: Which artists inspire your work today? What are your other sources of inspiration?
JJ: I’m lucky – in addition to my practice, I also work as a collections manager for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the only museum solely dedicated to LGBTQ+ art. This position allows me to interact with a wide cross-section of queer art and artists from art history and the contemporary moment. I am constantly inspired by these works and find the most inspiration in queer artists who use their work as a means to build more beautiful and radical futures. Unrelated to that, however, I can say that Lisa Frank is probably the biggest aesthetic influence on my work. I’m definitely a 90s kid in that sense.
H: What are your hopes for the LGBTQIA+ community right now?
JJ: I hope that our allies will come forward in concrete ways, both for the LGBTQIA+ community as a whole, but more specifically for trans people. We need our allies to stand up for us right now and not just pay lip service or show performative support by donating corporate money for pride. I hope the current trend of anti-trans legislation spreading across the country will inspire cisgender people around the world to become outraged and respond to that outrage. I hope our allies will educate themselves, vote, speak up and lend their support in any way they can before it’s too late.
