“For the revolution… stay ready so you don’t have to get ready.”
Artists and Rights, Episode 1: Living a Life While Decolonizing the Mind
Artists and Rights, Episode 2: Superpowers and Guiding Principles: Defining What You Want
Nao Bustamante is an internationally known artist, originally from California; she now resides in Los Angeles. Bustamante’s precarious work encompasses performance art, video installation, visual art, filmmaking, and writing. The New York Times says, “She has a knack for using her body.” Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around the world. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sundance International Film Festival, Outfest International Film Festival, El Museo del Barrio Museum of Contemporary Art, First International Performance Biennial, Deformes in Santiago, Chile and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. She was also an unlikely contestant on TV network Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow. In 2008 she received the Chase Legacy award in Film (in conjunction with Kodak and HBO). She was the Artist in Residence of the American Studies Association in 2012. In 2013, Bustamante was awarded the (Short-term) CMAS-Benson Latin American Collection Research Fellowship and also a Makers Muse Award from the Kindle Foundation. In 2014/15 Bustamante was the Queer Artist in Residence at UC Riverside and in 2015 she was a UC MEXUS Scholar in Residence in preparation for a solo exhibit at Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles. Bustamante’s video work is in the Kadist Collection.
You can also find Nao Bustamante here:
Roski Talks Lecture at USC (2014)
Documentation from her interventionist performance on Bravo’s “Work of Art”
Selected Work
Nao Bustamante, Given Over to Want (Solo Performance), 2019. No New Idols Performance Festival, Riga, Latvia.
Given Over to Want is an ongoing conversation within Bustamante’s performance works. Sculpting the body with tape, shadow-play and boxed wine all provide material for the exploration between human want, both natural and contrived. The performance deals with the themes of transformation and desire. The image is as primordial as it is hungry and holy, both fully human and fully alien.
Nao Bustamante, Deathbed, 2015. Photo, video and performance installation at STEP AND REPEAT, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Eden Batki.
About Deathbed: “Like many children I had an obsession with death and the idea of not being or being transformed into something else all together. I would lie in bed at night and imagine myself, dead, in my satin lined casket and would try to breathe very shallow to bring about a thin state of being, a sliver of awareness of being inside and outside of my body at the same time. Conjuring the worked up emotional state of my family and friends. In 2003, I joined thousands of other pilgrims at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home in Manhattan to see the queen of salsa, Celia Cruz, lie in state. The image of Celia on her post-mortem tour burned into my mind. She was wearing all cream colored garments and had pearl shaded nail polish and held a gold crucifix. She “slept” in a cream colored satin interior, and bronze exterior coffin. Her hair, which was colored in her signature golden hues, was arranged like a sleeping mermaid on the pillow, her eyes were shut with brush of silver shadow. Her lips carried a faint and restful smile. Celia was prepared to die and arranged much of the tableau. In Deathbed, I continue the mediation of childhood, but attempt to call up the precise moment at which a life is exiting the body; the surprise and release of leaving.” —Nao Bustamante
Nao Bustamante, Soldadera, 2015. Installation view at Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Dale Griner.
With this exhibition, artist Nao Bustamante invites us to engage the images, mythologies, and histories surrounding soldaderas, the women who fought in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). Soldaderas were an essential part of Mexico’s long and violent civil war. They cared for whole armies, and for their children. They joined the struggle as support troops, they took up arms, they nursed the living and buried the dead. When it came to their own welfare, however, soldaderas had to look out for themselves. They endured all that men endure in war, and more.