MoMA Ps1 Presents Major Exhibition of Artist Vaginal Davis Opening October 9

Portrait of Vaginal Davis. Downtown. 1993. Photo: Reynaldo Rivera

This fall, MoMA PS1 will present a major exhibition of Vaginal Davis, spanning five decades of her practice as a performer, visual artist, author, filmmaker, musician, educator, self-proclaimed “Blacktress,” and countercultural icon. Originating at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product makes its US debut at PS1, opening October 9, 2025. Organized thematically, the exhibition includes major installations, video, paintings, zines, audio works, sculptures, and cross-disciplinary collaborations, as well as extensive archival materials. The presentation spotlights Ms. Davis’s role as an underground trailblazer in the overlapping realms of art, music, performance, and queer politics—as well as her uncompromising glamour.

An archival display focused on her early career in her hometown, Los Angeles, traces the tributaries of her early career in the 1980s and ‘90s. A founding mother of the city’s queercore scene, Ms. Davis was, in her own words, “too gay for the punk scene and too punk for the gays.” Early videos, photographs, and ephemera detail her critical position at this nexus of the punk and queer worlds, highlighting her bands—¡Cholita! The Female Menudo; black fag; Pedro, Muriel, & Esther (PME); and the Afro Sisters, whose 1984 unreleased album gives the exhibition its title—as well as performances, photoshoots, and club nights. In a dedicated cinema room, films such as That Fertile Feeling (1983) and The White to Be Angry (1999) demonstrate Ms. Davis’s embodied pastiche of social mores and horrors, exposing cracks in the myth of a singular identity.

Ms. Davis’s time in Los Angeles reappears in the installation HAG – small, contemporary, haggard (2012), a tribute to the eponymous gallery she ran out of her Sunset Boulevard apartment from 1982 to 1989. During its run, HAG Gallery featured the work of creatives such as actor John Drew Barrymore (who lived next door), designer Rick Owens, and vocalist Alice Bag, among many others. First realized in 2012 at PARTICIPANT INC. in New York, HAG recreates the footprint of the original Los Angeles gallery in the form of an Ames room, whose torqued architecture distorts the scale of viewers who enter it—rendering the small large and vice versa. Papered with a “lesbian domesticity” wallpaper, it houses sculptures made of bread baked in the likenesses of Mariah Carey and Justin Timberlake, as well as a series of portraits painted using discount makeup. Elsewhere, the exhibition brings together a broader selection of Ms. Davis’s paintings from the early 1990s through 2022, which, evocative of religious icon paintings, and painted with discontinued cosmetics, celebrate grande dames from courtesan Madame du Barry to actress Lillian Gish—”women trapped in the bodies of women,” as Ms. Davis notes. This selection also features three of Ms. Davis’s largest paintingsto date, all from the collection of TheMuseum of Modern Art, exalting deities such as Oshun, African Goddess of Love and Sweet Water (2021).

The installation HOFPFISTEREI offers visitors the chance to explore a vast collection of Ms. Davis’s writing, including her iconoclastic zines filled with poetry, pornography, and LA gossip; the columns she penned for the LA Weekly; her ongoing blog “Speaking From the Diaphragm”; and works of self published fiction. The installation highlights further channels through which Ms. Davis’s distinct voice circulated, such as audio works, “video zines,” and footage of live readings. As an active archive with a working photocopy machine, HOFPFISTEREI allows visitors to copy, compile, and collage their own editorial projects to take home with them.

The work The Wicked Pavilion (2021) comprises two installations: The Fantasia Library and The Tween Bedroom, which allow visitors to delve further into lineages of artistic influence and the political potency of desire. The “tween bedroom” is replete with a vanity, magazine clippings of crushes, movie posters, and an oversized papier-mâché phallus on a rotating bed. The Fantasia Library holds five hundred pink books that Ms. Davis has started writing but “never quite finished,” or aspires to write, with titles like “Semi Detached Bungalow” and “The Fiscal Clit.” It also features a selection of titles influential to Ms. Davis, from Kathy Acker’s novel Empire of the Senseless (1988) to Liz Renay’s self-help classic How to Attract Men (1966).

Central to Magnificent Product are Ms. Davis’s enduring collaborations with influential artists and collectives in the United States and abroad. Naked on my Ozgoad — Anal Deep Throat (2024–25) is a new multimedia installation made in collaboration with New York-based artist Jonathan Berger that materializes Ms. Davis’s life-long love for L. Frank Baum’s Oz books through sculpture, sound, and prints made directly on the museum’s walls. The installation recalls her first art exhibition—an earlier reimaging of Baum’s children’s novels—at the Pio Pico Library in Los Angeles at age eight.

In 2005, Ms. Davis relocated from Los Angeles to Berlin. Shortly prior to her move, she had begun collaborating with the Berlin-based artist collective CHEAP. Founded by Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel, and Daniel Hendrickson in 2001, the group creates performances, videos, installations, and other discursive forms that combine theory and pleasure, politics and whimsy, aesthetics and sex. The sound, object, and moving image installation Choose Mutation, with Photographs by Annette Frick (2024), presented in PS1’s double-height gallery, features a dystopian video about paranoia and the resonance of political control over the body, projected onto a motorized billboard. The work, conceived by Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel, and Martin Siemann, also includes a series of black-and-white photographs by Annette Frick depicting the CHEAP collective members in early performances.

Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product marks the first career-spanning institutional exhibition of Ms. Davis’s work in the United States. Originally exhibited across six venues in Stockholm, the PS1 iteration showcases the full breadth of her expansive, unruly, and ever-relevant practice under one roof. Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product is accompanied by a major publication, comprising commissioned essays by authors including Hendrik Folkerts, Lia Gangitano, Bojana Kunst, Elisabeth Lebovici, and Troizel. The catalogue also includes twenty letters to Vaginal Davis from former collaborators, friends, and co-conspirators, including Jonathan Berger, Darby English, Sheldon Gooch, Lisa Teasley, Wu Tsang, and band members of Xiu Xiu, among many others.

The exhibition is organized by Hendrik Folkerts, Curator of International Contemporary Art and Head of Exhibitions, Moderna Museet, Stockholm. The chapters at partner institutions were organized in collaboration with Eva-Lena Bergström (Nationalmuseum), Anna Efraimsson (MDT), Richard Julin and Therese Kellner (Accelerator), Marti Manen and Isabella Tjäder (Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation), and Cecilia Widenheim (Tensta Konsthall).

The presentation at MoMA PS1 is organized by Jody Graf, Assistant Curator, and Sheldon Gooch, Curatorial Assistant.

ABOUT MoMA PS1

MoMA PS1 champions art and artists at the intersection of the social, cultural, and political issues of our time. Providing audiences with the agency to ask questions, access to knowledge, and a forum for public debate, PS1 has offered insight into artists’ diverse worldviews for more than 40 years. Founded in 1976, the institution was a defining force in the alternative space movement in New York City, transforming a 19-century public schoolhouse in Long Island City into a site for artistic experimentation and creativity. PS1 has been a member of New York City’s Cultural Institutions Group (CIG) since 1982 and affiliated with The Museum of Modern Art since 2000.

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