ALOK + Frida Kahlo: Unruly Beauty

Join writer, activist, and performer ALOK for an expansive program that will link their multi-dimensional practice with Frida Kahlo's boundary-breaking legacy and transgressive ways of being shaped by fashion, photography, and art.

The program will take place in conjunction with the Rose Art Museum's exhibition Frida Kahlo: POSE, on view through January 2, 2022. The exhibition examines Kahlo's complex identities and diverse modes of creativity in vintage photographs, paintings, works on paper, rare film footage, and ephemera. A central section of the exhibition is devoted to Kahlo's embrace of queer and gender-fluid ways of being, long before current language to describe non-conforming identities existed. ALOK's presentation will underscore this aspect of the exhibition and connect Kahlo's pioneering art and life to the work of contemporary artists and activists who continue to queer and complicate boundaries and definitions of Self today.

This conversation will be hosted online via Zoom Webinar; a short Q+A session will follow. POSE co-curators Dr. Gannit Ankori (Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator of the Rose Art Museum and Professor of Fine Arts and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University) and Circe Henestrosa (Rose Guest Curator for Special Exhibitions and Head of the School of Fashion, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore) will moderate the conversation.

This event will have automated closed captions through Zoom. The Rose is committed to making its virtual programs accessible to all. If anything else would make your participation easier, please email inquiries and requests to Elizabeth Moy, Programs Coordinator.

ABOUT ALOK

ALOK (they/them) is an internationally acclaimed gender non-conforming writer, performer, and public speaker. As a mixed-media artist, their work explores themes of trauma, belonging, and the human condition. They are the author of Femme in Public (2017) and Beyond the Gender Binary (2020). They are the creator of #DeGenderFashion, a movement to degender fashion and beauty industries, and have been honored as one of HuffPo's Culture Shifters, NBC's Pride 50, and Business Insider's Doers.

This program is co-sponsored by the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality, and our partners at Brandeis University: the Asian-American and Pacific Islander Studies Program, the Department of Theater Arts, the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Gender and Sexuality Center.