Miss/They Camaraderie 2024 | curated by Yashi Davalos
at The Charlotte Street Foundation Gallery ( KCMO) | January 19th - March 2nd
Miss/They Camaraderie 2024 is an immersive exhibition into the world of drag performance and Black pageantry where the artworks are the “beauty queens” and the exhibition, the stage. Featuring seven artists whose works draw upon archival research and contemporary lens-based practices, Miss/They Camaraderie 2024 is a subversive and imaginative display of beauty, femininity, and non-binary expression. Curated by Charlotte Street Curatorial Fellow Yashi Davalos, Miss/They Camaraderie 2024 is an exhibition where “beauty begets camaraderie,” where viewers are showered in a glittering showcase of opulence, vanity, and queer identity.
Curatorial Statement:
Exploring vanity from a lens where the assumption that beauty begets camaraderie, the femme aesthetic, gender fluidity and non-binary expression explore the intersectional spectrum of beauty via social proximity and adjacency. This pageant in exhibition form and in its programming explore the agency of a socially fluid relationship to mobility and beauty in all forms of imagining “Miss/They Camaraderie.” This pageant exhibition contextualizes the futuristic consumption of modern-day photo realism and contemporary art practice as our “beauty queens” in a dialogue with the revisualizing timelines for archival research. Miss/ They Camaraderie has much experience with being subjected to representing mysticism, realism, professionalism, gender expression, non-linear mobility, and all of general epistemology, basically, being to others, very much all the above. This pageant program is a community centered convening that crowns a real-life local participant of femme and queer camaraderie. Miss / They Camaraderie offers the best of world building with pessimism, beauty futurism, identity surrealism, and most importantly, the exchange of vanity as a shared dialogue.Building frameworks outside of what bell hooks describes as “White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy” Miss/They Camaraderie is one of many voices in their community, but of course the winner of this Pageant is a black woman.
Featuring:
Boi Boy (Kansas City, MO), John Brant (Kansas City, MO), Delaney George (Los Angeles, CA), Jackob Graves (Kansas City, MO), Nasir Anthony Montalvo (Kansas City, MO), SunYoung Park (Kansas City, MO), and Trenity Thomas (New Orleans, LA)
https://charlottestreet.org/exhibition/miss-they-camaraderie-2024/