Visual & Studio Arts Performance Kris Grey

In conjunction with the exhibition Audience/Camera/Performer, on view at The Gallery at the Heimbold Visual Arts Center from November 29, 2021 – February 20, 2022, we are planning a campus-wide public program of live solo performances and lectures featuring each of the five artists in the exhibitions. Kris Grey will begin the public programming with a performance of their on-going Untitled (with torso), a captivating work in which Grey interacts with the plaster cast of their presurgical torso installed in the gallery. Grey, a self-described gender-queer artist, considers the body cast “a mask and portal to their former embodiment.

Image courtesy the artist with Louise O'Rourke

Kris Grey is a New York City based transgender artist who uses their body as raw material, often presenting themselves in states of extreme vulnerability as an invitation to experience transcendence or discover hidden queer histories. Grey’s cultural work includes curatorial projects, performance, writing, and studio production in ceramics. Grey has been a resident artist at the Bronx Museum, Fire Island Artist Residency, ANTI Festival for Contemporary Art, International Centre for Training in the Performing Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, and a Visiting Artist and Assistant Teaching Professor at Penn State University. In addition to their individual practice, Grey collaborates with Maya Ciarrocchi under the moniker Gender/Power. Gender/Power has been awarded a Baryshnikov Art Center residency, a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency, a Franklin Furnace grant, and a MAP Fund Grant. Grey's writing titled, Trans*feminism: fragmenting and re-reading the history of art through a trans* perspective, was published by Manchester University Press in Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories. Grey earned a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Ceramics and a Masters Degree in Fine Art from Ohio University in Ceramics. They perform, teach, and exhibit work internationally.