Forever coming soon

Chris E. Vargas’ museum dedicated to trans and non-binary art and history will always be under construction.
Story by Mary Gallagher

For as long as people have expected each other to "behave” and dress according to gender, many of us have defied those expectations.

For more than a decade, WWU Associate Art Professor Chris E. Vargas has been creating a museum devoted to the people who live and thrive outside these boundaries. 

Vargas’ Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art, known as MOTHA, brings together dozens of artifacts and works of art illuminating the experiences of trans and gender-fluid people.

Chris E. Vargas smiles for the camera, his chin in his hands.
WWU Associate Professor of Art Chris E. Vargas. Photo by Heather Poster.

“I started MOTHA because understanding my experience in a historical context made me feel connected to something bigger than myself,” Vargas says. “But I also wanted to examine what happens when marginalized histories get absorbed into mainstream institutions and exhibited on bigger platforms. History is never stable. We always have a stake in it, and it’s always dependent on the teller’s subjectivity and political aims in the present.”

The expansive collection includes artifacts from uprisings, protests and resonant moments in trans history, clothing representing and celebrating important “transcestors,” and work by trans artists. 

But one thing that the museum will never include, if Vargas has anything to say about it, is a building to keep it all in. No brick, no mortar, no climate-controlled cases, and certainly no bathrooms. (How many would there even have to be? Vargas jokes.)

MOTHA, as Vargas puts it, is “forever coming soon.” 

It’s a conceptual project that celebrates trans-centric art, history, culture and resilience while poking fun at the very concept of museum collections. 

Vargas and MOTHA have collaborated on physical exhibits in actual museums (the kind with bathrooms), including exhibitions at the New Museum in New York City, the Oakland Museum of California, the Portland Art Museum, and the Legacy Art Gallery at the University of Victoria. 

Now, the collection has taken a physical form in Vargas’s “Trans History in 99 Objects,” published in March by Hirmer and co-edited by David Evans Frantz, Christina Linden and Vargas. Vargas produced the book with significant grants from the Ford Foundation, Creative Capital, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Michael Asher Foundation. 

a collage of hundreds of people and fictional characters under the banner MOTHA, Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art
Vargas created this poster of people and fictional characters who were "hiroes" and "transcestors" in 2012. Vargas has been adding to the "museum" ever since.

He first started accumulating a trans canon in 2012 when he invited people on social media to name people and fictional characters who were their “hiroes” and “transcestors.” 

Hundreds of submissions rolled in—and not all of those submitted would call themselves "trans," Vargas says—from Charlie Brown’s sweet-natured, flat-sandaled pal Peppermint Patty to Sir Lady Java, a performer whose hit show at the Redd Foxx Club in Los Angeles was targeted by the LAPD for violating a city ordinance against cross-dressing performers. 

A photo of Java, wearing a stylish mini dress and kitten heels while carrying a protest sign, appeared in Jet magazine in 1967 amid a nationwide movement against police raids on gay bars. 

a black and white news photo of a smiling woman holding a protest sign, Java vs. Right to Work, in front of the marquee of the Red Foxx theatre.
No. 2: A page from Jet magazine on Nov. 16, 1967, from the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. In the background is a page from the March 1967 edition of Sepia, from the Black LGBT Project.

Vargas spent months collaging over 250 images into a one-page broadsheet, contemplating the idea of a museum while carefully stitching together the images. What might a canon of trans art and history look like, he wondered, and could it be inclusive and still be called a canon? Could anyone even create a museum collection without repeating the inequalities of museums themselves? 

“These questions only seemed to lead me to more questions,” Vargas says, “so I walked into that metaphorical burning building and just made a museum.” 

While he’s playfully critiquing the power of museums and archives, Vargas also wants to leverage MOTHA’s museum-weight cachet to boost trans artists. Or, as Vargas puts it, “wedging my foot in the door of institutional spaces and shooing in as many other trans and queer people as I can get away with.” 

Artist Tuesday Smillie was the first recipient of the MOTHA Virtual Artist Residency. Such residencies lend “legitimacy” to artists wanting the attention of galleries, collectors and other parts of the arts establishment that have been reluctant, until recently, to extend their resources to trans artists, Vargas says. 

Smillie’s recreation of a 1970s protest banner is one of several artifacts in the MOTHA collection that are recreated or even imagined. 

members of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries carry a banner with their group name in a parade in New York City.
Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries march in the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade in New York City, June 204, 1973. Photo by Richard C. Wandel, the LGBT Community Center National History Archive, New York.

A reproduction of a 1973 liberation parade banner, made with dark lace representing the fabric's folds and shadows.
No. 69: Artist Tuesday Smillie recreated "Street Transvestites 1973," from the photo (above) of the 1973 liberation parade. The 2015 work is in the collection of the Rose Art Museum, a gift of Lizbeth and George Krupp.

People go to museums in part because they want to engage with the actual artifacts of history, but sometimes those items aren’t around anymore. A “constructed experience” can be just as meaningful, Vargas says. 

“If we really want to engage with history, why not?” he says. “We may just have to construct it for ourselves.” 

To mark an important pre-Stonewall resistance event in 1966 in San Francisco, artist Nicki Green recreated a coffee cup from Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, where trans women fought back against police violence. 

A hand holds a mid-century style coffee cup printed with Gene Compton's Cafeteria Riot San Francisco 1966
No. 14: "Breaking Dishes at Gene Compton's Cafeteria," 2016, by Nicki Green. Green found mugs at thrift stores in San Francisco and created the decals to commemorate the pre-Stonewall uprising. Photo by Marcel Pardo Ariza.

But sometimes we imbue historical objects with too much importance, Vargas says, particularly when our understanding of events continues to shift. For example, trying to verify what projectile sparked the 1969 Stonewall Riots, a bottle, glass, a shoe, a punch—or something worse—hides the real source of change: years of collective effort by intersecting groups, he says.  

a brown beer bottle, a white high-heeled pump, a drinking glass, a broken brick, a pile of dog poo, coins, and a Daily news front page headline: Judy was star in final role/hundreds linger after funeral.
No. 78: Chris E. Vargas collected a few "artifacts" that may or may not have sparked the Stonewall Riot.

The museum also includes items from many trans heroes. 

In 2019 Leo Baker was to be among the first skateboarders to compete in the Olympics. But Baker chose to resign from the U.S. team rather than compete representing a gender he doesn’t identify with—not to mention a name and pronouns that weren’t his. Baker is now a successful professional skateboarder in New York City; his chest binder is in the Smithsonian and included in MOTHA. 

a beige v-neck tight-fitting undergarment that covers the chest
No. 10: Skateboarder Leo Baker's chest binder is in the collection of the National Museum of American History.

Autumn Sandeen kept her trans identity hidden while serving in the U.S. Navy from 1980 to 2000, but wore a women’s naval uniform when she handcuffed herself to the White House fence—twice—with other service members to protest “Don’t Ask, Don’t tell,” a military policy that required gay, lesbian and bisexual service members keep their orientation a secret.  

A woman holds in her lap a folded U.S. Navy women's uniform and cap.
No. 28: Autumn Sandeen holds her Service Dress Blue U.S. Navy Uniform, in 2022. Lambda Archives of San Diego, Photo by Marcel Pardo Ariza.

Many of the items in the collection explore the increased visibility of trans people. But that cultural attention hasn’t brought increased safety, Vargas says, particularly for people of color, disabled people, and children who have faced increasing political attacks fueled by moral panic. 

“More visibility brings more vulnerability to many,” he says, “especially to those of us whose lives are already precarious.”

Cover of Time magazine featuring Laverne Cox and the words The Transgender Tipping Point/America's next civil rights frontier
No. 32: Laverne Cox on the iconic June 9, 2014, Time magazine cover.

The collection also reaches back into history. Long before “trans,” “gender fluid” and “non-binary” were common terminologies, the Quaker religious leader known at the Public Universal Friend identified as a genderless spirit. Artist Sunny A. Smith created a hat based on one owned by the Friend. 

A person faces away from the camera wearing a wide-brimmed brown hat with whispy, ghostly trim on the edge.
No. 60: Artist Sunny A. Smith created and wears "Unquiet Comforter," a hat to represent the Public Universal Friend, also known as The Comforter, a religious mystic who lived from 1752 to 1819 and said they were beyond human gender.

Vargas and his coeditors also included works of art by trans people – and works that illustrated art’s power to provide comfort and inspire resilience. 

Vincent Chong’s “Teal at 98.6 degrees” depicts Kwun Yum, a bodhisattva who transcends gender identity, on a pendant that Chong wore above the heart for protection as a child.  

A painting of a pendant nestled against someone's bare chest
No. 49: Artist Vincent Chong's oil painting, "Teal at 98.6 degrees F," 2022, depicts a pendant of Kwun Yum, a bodhisattva who transcends gender identity.

Now that the book is complete, Vargas says he might take a break from MOTHA, but he hasn’t stopped thinking about how his virtual museum can influence the culture. He’d love for the museum to gather a cohort of queer, trans and non-binary artists to study and create with one another. 

Like the museum itself, the plans are far from finished. 

“It’s just sort of a dream that I still have to think through,” he says. 

Mary Gallagher is editor of Window magazine