Our spring/summer exhibition No Bios, featured drawing, painting, sculpture, and video—including never-before-exhibited artwork—from three generations of artists.

No Bios

Curated by Isis Awad for Visual AIDS
EFA Project Space
May 11–June 24, 2023

Featured artwork by Jerome Caja (1958–1995), Chloe Dzubilo (1960–2011), Stevie Cisneros Hanley, Reverend Joyce McDonald, Sofia Moreno, Pamela Sneed, Tabboo!, and D’Angelo Lovell Williams

Gallery Hours: Wed–Sat, 12–6PM
Opening Reception: Thurs, May 11, 6–8PM

Jerome Caja

Jerome Caja (1958 – 1995) was born in Cleveland into a Catholic family of 11 boys. He majored in studio art at Cleveland State and earned a master's degree in ceramics at the San Francisco Art Institute.

This humble, self-possessed artist painted exquisite miniatures with everything that you would find in a drag queen's handbag: nail polish, glitter, make-up, lipstick, and eye liner. His canvases included pistachio shells, lockets, discarded bottle caps, and small scraps of paper.

Jerome's iconography pays homage to a wide cast of saints and sinners: Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Saint Lucy, Satan, imps, priests, cherubs, demented clowns, cannibalistic birds, pigs, and gay icons. Jerome died at the height of the AIDS-art-activism era in San Francisco from complications related to HIV. His papers are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and his work is collected in major museums around the country.

Chloe Dzubilo (1960–2011) was an artist and AIDS and transgender activist. A native of Connecticut, Dzubilo moved to New York in 1982. She studied art at Parsons School of Design and received an associate degree in gender studies from the City University of New York, City College. In the 1990s, she became an icon of downtown nightlife, writing plays for and performing with the Blacklips Performance Cult and editing the group’s zine, Leif Sux. As lead singer and songwriter for the punk-rock band Transisters, she performed at CBGB, SqueezeBox at Don Hill’s, and other trendsetting hubs of downtown culture. She was a muse for designers Marc Jacobs, Alexis Bittar, and Patricia Field, as well as photographers Nan Goldin, Alice O’Malley, Tanyth Berkeley, David Armstrong, Steven Klein, and Michael Sharkey. Dzubilo also appeared in the films Wigstock: The Movie (1995), Visiting Desire (1996), Gang Girls 2000 (1999), and Rock Star (2004).

A longtime volunteer for the LGBT Community Center’s groundbreaking Gender Identity Project, Dzubilo served on its transgender-HIV-prevention team, conducting prevention outreach in bars and nightclubs and on strolls. Dzubilo was involved with the political-action group Transsexual Menace and, in 1997, went on to direct one of the first federally funded HIV-prevention programs for transgender sex workers. In 2001, she founded the Equi-AID Project, a Manhattan-based riding program that specifically targeted children infected with or affected by HIV/AIDS, as well as other at-risk youth.

Her visual art has been shown at the Bronx Museum, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and the Museum of the City of New York, as well as in numerous gallery exhibitions including Participant Inc. and La MaMa Galleria. In January 2011, she cocurated, with Jeffrey Greene, the exhibition “Transeuphoria” at Umbrella Arts in New York.

Dzubilo died at age fifty on February 18, 2011, in New York City.

Stevie Cisneros Hanley

“The Dainty Satanist”, as described by Vaginal Davis, Stevie Cisneros Hanley, has exhibited extensively, nationally and globally, by producing and distributing cultural exchange in unexpected ways and places, from sex clubs to churches. Envisioning art that opens the floodgates to postcolonial pluralist potentials beyond a scarcity mentality that justifies violence and ties value to a fetishetic cult of hierarchy. Socially promiscuous enough to even invite the pearl-clutching gatekeepers to a party dancing to the lifegiving frequencies of the infinite unknown. I used to say I was a Bastard child of Colonialism. Bastard is a colonial word I used for the convenience of reducing myself to a soundbite. As a multiracial person of Mexican (Zacatecas), Irish, indigenous Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli), and Punjabi ancestry, I have learned that a part can still be whole. Through an interdisciplinary practice of image-making and defacing, by way of drawing, painting, writing, sewing, and collaging–I learn to listen and speak in reciprocity, to tune into polyphonic ancestral Hāmau (silences) full of love and infinite wisdom that are gifted to us all.

Stevie Cisneros Hanley has been anchored in Chicago for the past ten years where they work as an artist and educator and member of the Bargaining Committee of the newly unionized School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They teach Queer Color, a Research Studio class awarded the Pulitzer Campus Visit and a Course Enrichment Grant to work with Indigenous cultural preservationists and producers, such as Hinaleimoana Kwai Kong Wong-Kalu and Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu. Hanley is Co-Chair of the 2023 Terrain Biennial. They have had solo shows at the International Museum of Surgical Science, University Club of Chicago, M LeBanc, and Center of Endless Progress Berlin. Hanley has participated in numerous international exhibitions including Tüyup, Istanbul; Artist House Jerusalem, Jerusalem; La Mama Galeria, New York City; Lodos Contemporary, Mexico City; Julius Caesar Chicago; September, Berlin; NADA Miami; Iceberg Projects, Chicago; and CANARY, Los Angeles, Twins Gallery Laundry, and the Poetry Foundation.

Reverend Joyce McDonald

Reverend Joyce McDonald (b. 1951; Brooklyn, New York) lives and works in New York. A self-taught, visionary multidisciplinary artist, activist, and minister, McDonald fuses experience with strength, hope, and power. In her tender sculptural works, she enshrines her own life stories and wider cultural experiences of family, love, loss, illness, healing, transformation, and transcendence.

As a teenager, she performed at the Apollo Theater in the girl group The Primettes. After her HIV diagnosis in 1985—the result of a long battle with addiction—McDonald was ordained as a minister at the Church of the Open Door in Brooklyn in 2009. She uses her own struggles to drive her work as an artist, activist, advocate, and self-identified “spiritual nurse.”

McDonald is represented by Gordon Robichaux, New York, where she presented her first solo exhibition in 2021. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including at Marc Selwyn Gallery, Los Angeles; Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; in Souls Grown Diaspora (curated by Sam Gordon), apexart, New York; AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism, Museum of the City of New York; Everyday, La MaMa Galleria, New York; Persons of Interest (curated by Sam Gordon), Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, New York; Curated, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, New York; taken-up, Judson Memorial Church, New York; and HIV+WOMEN+ART at Puffin Foundation Gallery, Teaneck, New Jersey.

McDonald’s work has been celebrated in the New York Times on two occasions, and is held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Sofia Moreno

Sofia Moreno is a multimedia artist whose subjects include expressions of the sacred and profane, the body, sexuality, religion, and socio-political issues within contemporary culture. Moreno was born and raised in Coahuila, Mexico and emigrated to the US in 1994. She studied at El Centro College, Dallas and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Moreno currently lives and works in Mexico City. Recent solo exhibitions include Sentimental Archeology, an Auto-Glorification Memorial at HG Chicago and Botched Garden of Earthly Delights: III Acts at Participant INC, NYC. She has participated in group exhibitions in Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Greece, Costa Rica, Brazil, and across the United States. For over a decade, Moreno has produced multimedia art events with artists and peers via s+s project, a non-commercial, curatorial organization she founded and currently directs. In 2020, Moreno founded DnQ, a community arts organization aimed at supporting trans artists and activists living in Mexico by awarding mini-grants in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. DnQ also hosts anartist’s residency in the South of Mexico.

Pamela Sneed

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer, and visual artist, author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams, two chaplets, Gift by Belladonna and Black Panther; Funeral Diva (City Lights, 2020), winner of the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award; and the chapbook If the Capitol Rioters Had Been Black (F magazine and Motherbox Gallery, 2021). Her poetry appeared in Nikki Giovanni’s The 100 Best African American Poems, and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes in poetry.

Her visual work has been exhibited at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, the Ford Foundation, and Laurel Gitlen in New York City.

She is online faculty in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) low-res MFA program teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has been a visiting artist at SAIC in the program for six years. She also teaches poetry and art across disciplines at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Sneed has won a 2023 Creative Capital Grant in Literature, a 2022 BOFFO residency on Fire Island, a 2021 Black Queer Art Mentorship Award, and was a finalist for the New York Theater Workshop’s 2021 Golden Harris Award.

She has performed and spoken at the Whitney Museum for American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the High Line, the New Museum, MoMA, the Broad Museum, the Toronto Biennale, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Bard Center for Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, the New School, the New York Public Library, and NYU’s Center for Humanities. She has published in the Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Paris Review, Frieze, Harper's Bazaar, Academy of American Poets, and New York Times, and been featured in New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and on the cover of New York Magazine.

Tabboo!

Tabboo! (Stephen Tashjian, b. 1959, Leicester, MA) is a multidisciplinary artist and painter based in New York City. He renders his subjects in a direct, intuitive style, suspending figurative elements against dreamlike colorfields. Tabboo! often draws subjects from his surroundings, depicting expressive cityscapes, portraits of friends, or imaginative still lifes inspired by the plants in his apartment. He also paints large, panoramic works and site-specific murals. These immersive settings recall the painted backdrops he made for performances in the 1980s and 1990s. While performing regularly himself, Tabboo! also designed numerous event fliers, posters, and album covers featuring his signature curvilinear text, which still appears in his work. Roberta Smith described Tabboo!’s paintings as “delicious, fresh and transparent, revealing every touch of color, every pour and drip.”

His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida: and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas. A solo exhibition of Tabboo!’s recent paintings will open in July 2023 at Karma, Los Angeles.

D'Angelo Lovell Williams

D’Angelo Lovell Williams (b. 1992, Jackson, Mississippi) is a Black, HIV-positive artist expanding narratives of Black and queer intimacy through photography. They earned their BFA in photography from Memphis College of Art in 2015, an MFA in photography from Syracuse University in 2018, and are a 2018 Skowhegan School of Art alum. They live and work in New York City. D'Angelo Lovell Williams has had four solo exhibitions with Higher Pictures in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. The 2020 exhibition, Papa Don't Preach, was presented in collaboration with Janice Guy at her gallery in Harlem.