LACE AND PAM PRESENT A MARATHON OF PERFORMANCES AT THE AIDS MONUMENT AS PART OF CIRCA: QUEER HISTORIES FESTIVAL ON OCTOBER 2, 2026
Los Angeles, CA (September 10, 2026)—As part of the Circa: Queer Histories Festival, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and the Performance Art Museum (PAM) present a marathon of five-minute performances at STORIES: The AIDS Monument in West Hollywood under the theme of ACTION = LIFE on Friday, October 2, 2026 at 6 PM.
This program coincides with the High Performance: A 2-Year Conference (2025–2027) initiative, dedicated to the Los Angeles-based magazine that was the first international art publication devoted exclusively to performance art, and its enduring influence on contemporary art and society. High Performance was also the first US-based art publication to dedicate significant editorial coverage to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Looking specifically at queer artists featured in High Performance who created work around queer activism and younger artists inspired by this work, these short performances provide an opportunity for the public to gather and engage in both oral histories and performance.
Performers participating include Jerri Allyn, Ajani Brannum, Au Chung aka Dacity, Gabrielle Civil, Kevin Emilio Contreras, Ben Cuevas, Patty Gone, Sebastian Hernandez, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Sophia le Fraga, Badly Licked Bear, Caleb Luna, Page Person, and Sheree Rose. Representing multiple generations and perspectives, these artists present site-specific interventions that range from spoken word, poetry reading, and performative and poetic actions that respond to the Monument and the history of queer activism. This program is presented as a part of Fall of Freedom, a national call for creative resistance and amplification of all struggles against repression and state violence.
About the Performers
A citizen of the world, Jerri Allyn is an activist artist, educator and scholar interested in civic engagement, exploring themes of social justice and empowerment in her projects. S/He often questions power structures, challenges gender norms, and addresses issues related to women’s labor, sexuality, queer rights, and resolving conflicts creatively.
Jerri’s artwork is often in a narrative, storytelling form. S/He strives for aesthetic innovations, incorporating contemporary community insights, historical facts, and satiric wit. Frequently collaborating s/he utilizes diverse mediums, including site-oriented performance and installation art, sculptural tableaus; audio, video and billboards; artists books, graphic multiples and page art – adapting each to suit theme and intention.
Allyn’s interdisciplinary projects provide a forum for multiple voices, moving fluidly between art settings, academia, and targeted neighborhood sites. S/He strategically builds connections with communities through shared interests to cross pollinate audiences – raising awareness, inviting dialogue, and fostering social change. Allyn’s been commissioned and received cultural grant funding for 30+ years.
Ajani Brannum is an undisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice is a meditation on performance, embodiment, and selfhood. Through choreography, text, and sound, they reimagine the ancestral wisdoms of myth, folklore, teaching, and prayer. Ajani has created spaces of encounter with REDCAT, ODC, Human Resources Los Angeles, Materials & Applications, Highways Performance Space, Los Angeles Performance Practice, in classrooms, on tabletops and screens, and when no one is looking. Born in Anchorage, Alaska, they hold an AB in English and a Certificate in Dance from Princeton University, and a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA.
Photo by Matt Savitsky.
Dacity is an LA-based drag performer, writer, and LGBTQIA+ advocate whose work blends performance, storytelling, and queer world-building. Since debuting in 2023, Dacity has received two California College Media Awards, released original music, launched the queer podcast Dyzz Bytch, and founded TRANS•FORM. With a background in journalism and political education, their work centers uplifting unheard queer voices and exploring identity through performance and media.
Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered over fifty original performances worldwide in galleries, theaters, classrooms, and the streets. Recent work includes Black Weirdo School Psychic Defense Club at RESILIENCE presented by LACE, Black Weirdo School Poetry Club at Crawl Space in LA, Black Weirdo School (Lorde Remix) at the Audre Lorde Symposium in New York, and Black Weirdo School (Pop Up Critique) at PNCA in Portland. She is the author of five performance memoirs, most recently In & Out of Place, which documents her time living/creating in Mexico. Her writing has appeared in New Daughters of Africa, Kitchen Table Translation, Migrating Pedagogies, and A Mouth Holds Many Things. Her performance videos have been exhibited internationally and online. She teaches in the community and at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.
Photo by Ray Barrera.
Kevin Emilio Contreras (b. 1992) is a Queer Peruvian American visual artist from Los Angeles; his practice spans photography, video art, and performance. He is in his final year at USC Roski, where he is a candidate for the Masters in Fine Arts. During the course of his first year, he produced In Inca Kola We Trust (2025), a video performance work; as well as the Astral Imaginal trilogy, a cycle of three short video works shot on Super 8 and 16mm film stocks. Topically, his work poses questions about time, space, the lost and nearly-forgotten Hauntology of our physical world; filtered through a Queer Latinx lens of spiritual experience and expression.
Photo by Ceraun the DivaNun.
Born in Southern California in 1987, Ben Cuevas is an artist whose work highlights queerness and the body within the gendered history of fiber arts. Drawing from his queer, non-binary, HIV-positive lived experience, Cuevas’s work spans a wide range of media including sculpture, installation, photography, performance, sound, and—most prominently—knitting. He earned a B.A. in mixed media installation art and photography from Hampshire College in 2010. Cuevas’s artworks have been exhibited widely, including venues such as The Leslie-Lohman Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, El Museo del Barrio, and beyond.
Photo by Scott Cullen.
Patty Gone is a poet, artist, and scholar. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, BOMB, Hyperallergic, and Art Papers. She has performed or exhibited at the Queens Museum, Locust Projects, Human Resources, and The Poetry Project. She lives in Los Angeles.
Sebastian Hernandez (b. 1990, Los Angeles, works and lives in Los Angeles) is a multi-disciplinary trans femme artist who received a B.A. in both Art Practice and Dance and Performance Studies from the University of California Berkeley. Sebastian explores making art with mediums like movement, sculpture, performance, photography, creative writing and DJing. Hernandez works with and through feminist, queer, indigenous and gender theoretical frameworks as well as notions of collectivity to generate works that complicate Mexican and Chicano narratives in the contemporaneous social imagination. Their art making is embedded in personal narrative, their indigenous Mexica (Aztec) ancestry, queer club culture and the history of the brown body in relation to the U.S.-Mexico borderland. Sebastian’s movement based practice is informed by their long standing practice of danza Mexica (Azteca), Vogue and a wide range of modern dance techniques like GAGA, Flying Low, Laban and Afro Modern. Expanding and growing from solo works to more collaborative art works and performances, Sebastian has worked with a variety of visual, sound, dance and fashion artists specific to their hometown of Los Angeles. These collaborative works have become a channel for new creative challenges that push to question and speak to the complexities of queer kinship and traditional art and dance today. Hernandez has presented work at REDCAT, Human Resources, LACE, Commonwealth & Council, MOCA Geffen Contemporary, ICA LA, MUSTACHE Mondays, Club Scum, NAVEL LA, ONE ARCHIVES, 4th street Bridge, Santee Alley, BOFFO, Performance Space New York, Palm Spring Art Museum, Jessica Silverman Gallery and more. In 2020, Sebastian was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist award.
Los Angeles native Marcus Kuiland-Nazario is an interdisciplinary artist, arts educator, performance curator and producer. Kuiland-Nazario’s works are long-term research based cross-genre projects exploring extreme states of emotion such as grief, anger and loss influenced by the cultural and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora. He is a founding artist of 18th Street Arts Center and Highways Performance Space as well as co-founder of Oficina de Proyectos Culturales, a contemporary art center in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and LA Community Health Project, a harm reduction street based needle exchange program. His performance works have been included in national and international festivals including the Rapture Festival, ICA London, London; the Rompeforma Festival, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, Los Angeles. Kuiland-Nazario is the recipient of the 2020 Santa Monica Artist Fellowship award.
Sophia Le Fraga uses objects, images, and poems to explore how language accumulates, circulates, and leaves traces over time. She has exhibited and performed at The Getty Center, JOAN, MOCA, MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York,” Artists Space, Camden Arts Center and PERFORMA. Le Fraga is the founding editor of No Issue, one-third of Grupo Ñ, and a member of the international artist group Collective Task.
Photo by Matthew Morrocco.
Badly Licked Bear is or has been an arts administrator, community leader, writer, curator, student, artist, and educator. Their artistic work stands in two circles – one a performance practice of embodied discipline, BDSM, and Looney Tunes and the other a subject-making practice concerned with survival in an age of (INSERT CRISIS HERE).
Their work has been exhibited or performed at venues including: MOCA, Hammer Museum, REDCAT, Human Resources Los Angeles, Machine Project, Cerritos College, The Wignall Museum, as well as less-institutional locales, like an illegal bar in the Pacific Ocean during the inaugural Current Triennial. Their work is in the library collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Otis College of Art and Design.
Caleb Luna is a writer, performer and assistant professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Their teaching, writing and research merges fat studies and queer of color critique with media and performance studies. Their recent work considers how queer people continue to make life and find connection and pleasure amidst the ongoing polycrises of the current moment. You can follow more of their writing and work on Substack and Instagram under @chairbreaker.
Page Person makes live art and hosts the performance party The End of the World. Her work has been exhibited at Human Resources, the New Museum, the Los Angeles LGBT Center and The Hammer Museum. Her book EX-ARTIST will be published by Dopamine Press.
Photo by Matt Savitsky.
Sheree Rose has been thrilling, shocking, and exciting audiences worldwide since 1981, beginning with her collaborations with Bob Flanagan. Their groundbreaking show, Visiting Hours, opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 1992 and traveled to the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Rose has also collaborated with Mike Kelley, Nine Inch Nails, and Martin O’Brien. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally in Germany, Australia, Japan, and England. Rose co-produced the Sundance award–winning documentary, Sick, and is the subject of Y. Howard’s collection, Rated RX: Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan.
About the Performance Art Museum
Founded in 2023, the Performance Art Museum is an emergent non-profit organization that centers performance art in the foreground of contemporary practice. As the first museum dedicated exclusively to the presentation and preservation of the art of performance, PAM is the central venue for the discovery, interaction, and study of contemporary and historically significant performance artworks. For more information, visit pamuseum.org
About Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) champions artists, curators, and cultural workers who explore and defy boundaries through socially-engaged projects. We provide platforms within and beyond our space for diverse communities to connect deeply with challenging contemporary art. Uniquely positioned in the heart of Hollywood, LACE amplifies the voices and visions of Los Angeles’ diverse makers. LACE presents free, significant, and timely exhibitions, performances, and public projects, complemented by education initiatives.
About Circa
Circa is the first and only LGBTQ+ histories festival in the United States, held each October during LGBTQ+ History Month. Established in 2023, Circa: Queer Histories Festival is a month-long, LA County-wide programming series showcasing the trailblazing histories and vibrant cultural contributions of LGBTQ+ communities through the lens of present-day challenges and triumphs. Through exhibitions, performance, readings, screenings, lectures, dialogues, and parties, Circa features queer and trans artists, activists, and educators leading the movement for LGBTQ+ liberation. www.oneinstitute.org/circa/
