Page 32 - Vo Vo | FIX MY HEAD #6: QTPOC PUNK ARTISTS

NIA KING
Why, when and how did you start focussing
on QTPOC artists in particular?
My senior year of college I wrote my the-
sis for Ethnic Studies on a queer and
trans POC performance art organization
called Mangos with Chili. I thought their
work was really powerful and wanted to
look at the impact the QTPOC art, and this
organization in particular, was having on
people. It was right around the time when
everyone was talking about the queer youth
suicide epidemic in the US. Mangos with
Chili describes themselves as “committed
to showcasing high quality performance of
life saving importance by queer and trans
artists of color” and I wanted to inves-
tigate if their work actually save lives.
-
vents queer suicide, but people did say
that Mangos added value to their lives,
like their life was possible.
Tell us about yourself, your podcast and
your book!
I’m a queer mixed-race artist and activ-
ist living in Oakland, CA. I write zines,
draw comics, run a podcast, and occasion-
creative project is my podcast We Want the
Airwaves on which I interview queer and
trans artists of color about their lives
and their work. I’ve spent the last year
working with two friends, Terra Mikalson
and Jessica Glennon-Zukoff, turning some
of the best interview transcripts into a
book which is called Queer and Trans Art-
ists of Color: Stories of Some of Our
-
ber 26th, 2014. After that you will be
able to buy it on Amazon.
Do you have any particular approach to
who you chose to interview? Was it to
lift emerging artists into the spot-
light, and/or to mine the wisdoms of
veterans? Is there priority given to
artists that feature their identity as
a predominant theme in their work?
reaching out to artists whose work I
was familiar with and whom I had access
to (so mostly local), a lot of folks
that had been involved with Mangos with
heavily Black and Latino, and so this
year I have made a conscious effort to
reach out to more East Asian, South
Asian, Arab and Native folks. I feel
most comfortable doing interviews with
folks whose work I’ve had some famil-
iarity with for a while, but sometimes
I meet someone cool at a conference
and jump on the opportunity to talk to
them, even if I haven’t had a chance to
really check out much of their work.
That’s what happened with Kiley May, an
summer (2014) at the Allied Media Con-
ference. I wasn’t familiar with her
work, but I was really glad I got to
talk to her.