(L.A. in N.Y.) Vaginal Davis at MoMA PS1

Vaginal Davis, The Wicked Pavilion: Tween Bedroom (installation view) (2025–26). Image courtesy of the artist and MoMA PS1. Photo: Steven Paneccasio.

At the entrance of Magnificent Product, two vinyl eyes were stuck onto the doors that led into the first gallery. Even before entering, L.A.-born, Berlin-based artist Vaginal Davis’s gaze invited you into her sprawling, amorphous world—one of gestural paintings and low-fi filmmaking, of punk and drag performance, of zine-making subculture, of gossipy blogs, and of playful sculpture, big and small. Her all-encompassing practice is difficult to distill into words. And yet, language is central to her artistry. Throughout her retrospective and first major institutional exhibition in the U.S.—which closed at MoMA PS1 in New York in March after traveling from Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Gropius Bau in Berlin —Davis’s handwriting decorated the walls. Stacks of her printed materials unearthed corners of the 1970s and ’80s underground. Her bubblegum-pink library paid homage to literary icons like Octavia E. Butler, June Jordan, and Nikki Giovanni. No matter the form, be it performance, painting, or parody band, Davis infuses her work with reference to and reverence for language, using it as a tool to carve out and give shape to a world of her own.

Self-authorship is particularly relevant to Davis’s practice. In her now-23-year-old blog Speaking From the Diaphragm, Davis once wrote that mainstream publications often approached her with a story already in mind about her work, laced with preconceived notions.¹ Admittedly, I too entered the exhibition with an assumption, not so much concerning Davis but whether a major museum could do justice by an artist so historically at odds with the mainstream, the institution, and other forces of containment. “I don’t fit into mainstream society, but I also don’t really fit into ‘alternative culture,’ either,” Davis told The New Yorker in 2015.² “I was always too gay for the punks and too punk for the gays. I am a societal threat.” Since the ’70s, Davis has authored her own path as an originator of the homocore punk movement, carving a place for herself within the club performance scene, and working with nearly every artistic medium imaginable. As I engaged with the show, I found it was much more enthralling to consider the formal qualities of Davis’s work rather than my initial assumption: how she—while moving across multiple separate rooms, fluid in material and chronology—refused the allure of palatability and convention through constant, relentless experimentation. Davis is as much a painter as she is a drag queen, as much an author as she is a sculptor, and so on, and here, in Magnificent Product, her many selves were afforded the room to exist without boundary.

Where there’s one Vaginal Davis, there are many. The first Davis I met was the sculptor. Naked on my Ozgoad: Fausthaus — Anal Deep Throat (2024–ongoing), created with artist Jonathan Berger, occupied the first room of the exhibition. The entire installation was inspired by Davis’s first visual art showcase at L.A.’s Pio Pico Library when she was just eight years old. It was there that she first expressed her fascination with L. Frank Baum’s storytelling through drawings and dioramas inspired by the world of Oz, which the librarians then turned into a display.³ While Davis’s interest in Oz remains, her expression has expanded. At MoMA PS1, dark green floating shelves hung on parallel walls, illuminated by emerald pendant lights. Each shelf platformed cast-aluminum sculptures depicting characters and entities from Oz. While the figures are abstract, ultra-miniature versions of Glinda the Good, Ozma, Professor Wogglebug, and others, they’re no less monumental. Meticulously crafted, the sculptures are brought to life as much by residual fingerprints and handmade marks as they are the makeup that finish their surfaces off in dusts of gold, red, green, yellow, and blue. Even at this tiny scale, Davis manages to capture, for instance, the robot Tik-Tok in great detail, from the mechanical man’s rounded torso and startlingly wide-open eyes to his thick mustache and shiny metallic exterior. A showcase of her dexterity as an artist, Davis the painter also appears in the installation; using discontinued makeup, she transformed more of Baum’s fantastical figures and objects into murals painted onto the gallery walls. If Magnificent Product is an Oz of Davis’s very own, then this foyer was her glistening Emerald City.

As I ventured along the artist’s yellow brick road, not unlike Dorothy Gale, I met many more Davises along the way. The second version I came across was the gossipy historian-zine-maker. In the interactive Hofpfisterei (2024/25), I sifted through transparency sheets on an overhead projector, swapping an article about Black Fag, one of Davis’s many punk parody bands, for her column “Because I Said So,” which she published in GLUE Magazine from 2000 to 2002. “It was comforting to me that such a mega-diva was more paranoid than I was,” Davis wrote in one entry, talking about Hollywood’s Glenn Close, whom she learned was terrified of flying while Davis was seated next to her on a plane ride from Montreal to Paris.⁴ Here, and throughout the myriad other entries, zines, essays, and tell-alls scattered on a round table nearby, Davis recounts ideas about everything from culture to cruising. Davis dishes, exposes, and eats celebrities’ airplane food, all the while crafting her own story where gossip, cultural criticism, self-reflection, and history share equal weight in her world-building.

Later, in The Wicked Pavilion (2021), I met Davis the librarian and dioramist. In a pink-washed library, Davis paid homage to influential cultural figures—Butler, Jordan, and Giovanni, but also Wanda Coleman and Minnie Riperton, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz—with vibrant gestural paintings made from discontinued nail polish and makeup on found material. On the back of a postcard, Davis painted Audre Lorde in purple, white, and gray with thick, assured brush strokes, capturing the scholar’s energy and poetic style— indelible, lyrical, direct, expressive—more than her actual likeness. Shelved above the paintings were around 500 in-progress books from her own repertoire, with titles ranging from SHADE to TRADE. Whereas a traditional library might be seen as a mausoleum for completed literature, Davis’s reiterates the fluidity through which she approaches and uses language. Her library is malleable, pulsating with drafts, half-written fictions, and budding ideas. In the future, perhaps she’ll return to one of these books and finally finish its story off, or perhaps she won’t. Either way, the most important thing is that the shelves in her library continue to expand, and with it, a freedom to imagine, to merge fantasy with reality, and to write new worlds and selves into being.

In the second half of The Wicked Pavilion, Davis recreated her tween bedroom in a surrealist diorama: a child-sized vanity in the corner, pages of pop-culture ephemera and erotic magazines strung across the room, and a tiny bed rotating like a music box at the center. Although, instead of a ballerina spinning in the middle, there was a giant penis. Erect and curving upward, its head rests atop a light pink pillow. Cheekily rewriting her adolescence, Davis takes stock of the media that made her while simultaneously, and yet again, blurring the boundaries of being. Magazine cut-outs featuring Butler, Isabella Rossellini, and the pornographic magazine Straight to Hell were clipped to a clothesline. Davis is as much the dainty pink tulle pooling on the floor as she is the phallic figure tucked into bed. She is sculptor and author, archivist and historian. In Magnificent Product, Vaginal Davis is the many all at once—her world, punctuated only by both/and.

Vaginal Davis, The Wicked Pavilion (installation view) (2025-26). © Vaginal Davis. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin. Photo: GRAYSC.

About the author

Aaron Boehmer is a writer and researcher based in New York City. He covers culture, politics, and the arts and has written for The Nation, Literary Hub, The Drift, Los Angeles Review of Books, Texas Monthly, and others.

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