Living Free - Kia LaBeija: From pathology to wholeness

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Performative lecture and conversation with visual artist, Kia LaBeija.

Kia LaBeija is a contemporary artist who provokes awareness, acceptance and activism for HIV/AIDS through her portraiture and performance art. Her work explores the intersections of community, politics, fine art and activism. As a visual artist she stages digital portraits as theatrical and cinematic re-imaginings of non fictional events to spark conversation, complicating the way we view her subjects and the spaces they occupy. Her Portraiture utilizes the medium of story telling, to preserve histories, and make sociopolitical commentaries on current events. She is a featured artist in Art, AIDS, America, along side Keith Haring, Annie Leibovitz, Nan Goldin and Robert Mapplethorpe, where she is the only representation of a female artist of color living with and born with HIV. A performer by nature, LaBeija is a member of the Iconic House of LaBeija and uses Voguing as performance practice and community based work.

Conversation facilitated by Alex Fialho (Programs Director, Visual AIDS).

This event is part of a series of lectures for the course Living Free: Embodying healing and creativity. All events are free and open to the public, and will be available online at diversityarts.stanford.edu one week behind scheduled engagement.

What does it mean to live free? Justice based work urges us to interrupt systems of violence with systems of healing that recover traditions, invent new modalities, and connect to survival practices developed by many generations of people in community.

In this course we will bring together leadings artists, thinkers, organizers, and healers to envision work and embody practices that resist the subjugation and erasure of their bodies, land, and natural resources.