IMPERMANENT COLLECTIONS: Julia Bryan-Wilson on Queer and Trans Artists’ Museums

A similar dynamic, in which the museum is utilized by an artist as an instrument capable simultaneously of discipline, coerced revelation, and strategic opacity, is activated in Chris E. Vargas’s Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art (MOTHA), founded in 2013. Across his work, Vargas is interested in queering hegemonic regimes, reinventing them as liberatory rather than confining; for instance, his feature-length film Criminal Queers (2015), codirected with trans theorist and activist Eric A. Stanley, casts a humorous eye on the serious topic of prison abolition and transforms a prison-break narrative into a campy trans/queer rebellion.