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.