Curated by Gabrielle Civil, Black Motion Pictures is a series of Zoom interviews with radical Black creatives about race, performance, and representation conducted between June 2-14, 2020. Spanning a broad range of topics—Black punk music, heritage sites, re-enactments, queer ancestors— the series concludes with Fox Whitney. Who are you today and what do you do? Can you think of a performance—Black or otherwise—whatever that means—that has meant a lot to you? How is Black performance marked or archived? How does Black performance relate to time (to historicity or ephemerality)? What is a Black performance still? How does Black performance matter? What is a Black motion picture?
Fox Whitney (he/him) is the artist behind Gender Tender, an interdisciplinary performance project that centers his queer Black mixed transgender point of view. He creates experiences that investigate the nature of queer relationships, trans histories, and the surreal nature of transformation Gender Tender engages a team of artists trained in Fox’s unique methods modeled on cults, sitcoms and riots. Fox is a 2020 artist in residence at On the Boards in Seattle. He was selected as the 2018 artist in residence at Velocity Dance Center. His performance work has been commissioned and produced by On the Board’s NW New Works Festival and Solo Festival; Velocity’s Next Fest NW and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation; the Seattle International Dance Festival; Yellow Fish Epic Durational Performance Festival and was selected for the inaugural season of Seattle’s Gay City Arts. His short dance films have screened at CounterPulse in San Francisco, at Seattle’s Twist Film Festival, Translations: Seattle’s Transgender Film Festival and at Next Dance Cinema presented by Velocity and Northwest Film Forum. He has an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited his visual art nationally. He has performed in work by Morgan Thorson, Gabrielle Civil, Vladimir Kremenović, Keyon Gaskin, Andrew Schneider, and Malic Amalya. His most recent project MELTED RIOT, a queer meditation inspired by the Stonewall Riots of 1969 was presented by Velocity on the 50th anniversary of the riots in 2019. An online Melted Riot digital residency featuring a series of performances made specifically for Instagram and Zoom happened June 2020 with the support of On the Boards. He is currently working on a new edition of Melted Riot performances made for Zoom in conversation with the Henry Art Gallery’s online print and photography collection that will happen in September 2020. He is currently Interim Artistic Director at Velocity Dance Center. Fox loves wallowing in transitional space.
For questions, please email info.redcat@calarts.edu.