MCA Chicago And The Kitchen to Present MUSIC TALK: Justin Vivian Bond And Jim Hodges

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago will present Music Talk: Justin Vivian Bond and Jim Hodges, featuring acclaimed singer-songwriter, author, painter, performance artist, and actor Mx. Justin Vivian Bond with longtime friend and collaborator, visual artist Jim Hodges.

Co-produced with The Kitchen at Queenslab, this program is the next iteration of the MCA Music Talk series, which pairs powerhouse musicians with artists, activists, and writers for a presentation that features performances interspersed with conversations that go behind-the-music. This revelatory format gives way to revelatory exchanges on creative processes across disciplines and shared stories from the art world, weaving discussions between songs and sets. Music Talk: Justin Vivian Bond and Jim Hodges will be streamed on Facebook live on Saturday, October 30 at 3 pm CT.

For this Music Talk, Mx. Bond performs a concert against the backdrop of one of Jim Hodges' expansive sculptural installations. Mx. Bond moves audiences with her music, and brave and personal stories about the LGBTQ community, art, and activism. Together with Hodges, they reflect on their artistic processes, their entwined journey through the art world, and their dreams for how to reshape its future.

Mx. Bond has been at the forefront of trans visibility and activism since the early 1990's, and has been described as "the best cabaret artist of their generation." Hodges is known for his mixed-media sculptures and collages that involve delicate artificial flowers, mirrors, chains as spiderwebs, and cut-up jeans.

MCA Music Talks present an array of emerging and established musicians for intimate evenings of performance and conversation that reveal their inspirations, creative processes, and projects. The MCA pairs composers and performers pushing the boundaries of musical genres with prolific artists, activists, writers, and thinkers from Chicago and beyond to take on big ideas in art and culture.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Mx. Justin Vivian Bond has appeared on stage (Broadway and Off-Broadway, London's West End), screen (Shortbus, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Sunset Stories), television (High Maintenance, Difficult People, The Get Down), nightclub stages (most notably a decades long residency at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater in NYC), and in concert halls worldwide (Carnegie Hall, The Sydney Opera House). Their visual art and installations have been seen in museums and galleries in the US (Participant, Inc, The New Museum) and abroad (Vitrine, London). Their memoir Tango: My Childhood Backwards and in High Heels (Feminist Press) won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction. They are the recipient of an Obie, a Bessie, and a Tony nomination, an Ethyl Eichelberger Award, The Peter Reed Foundation Grant, The Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant for Artists, and The Art Matters Grant. They have self-released several full length recordings: most notably Dendrophile, and Silver Wells. As one half of the legendary punk cabaret duo Kiki & Herb they toured the world and released two cds: Do You Hear What We Hear? and Kiki and Herb Will Die For You at Carnegie Hall. Mx Bond has been at the forefront of Trans visibility and activism since the early 1990s. They have a Masters Degree in Live Art from Central Saint Martins College in London and have taught performance composition and Live Art Installation at NYU and Bard College. Currently Viv divides their time between residences in New York City's East Village and the Hudson Valley. In December of 2019 they made their debut at The Vienna Staatsoper in the world premiere of Olga Neuwirth's Orlando as Orlando's child.

Jim Hodges was born in 1957 in Spokane, Washington, USA. He lives and works in New York, USA. Hodges' work explores themes of fragility, temporality, love and death in a highly original and poetic vocabulary. He frequently deploys different materials and techniques: from ready-made objects to traditional media such as graphite and ink. Often disarmingly simple or executed with minimal means, Hodges' works express a sentiment of deeply felt experience and encourage a visceral and communal response. Whether working in materials such as curtains woven from artificial silk flowers, metal chains, glass, or using saliva to create ink transfer impressions on paper, Hodges' works are inhabited by the presence of the body. Incorporated in his choice of media and articulated in text and image is a narrative of human experience, one of life and death and of the proximity of contingency that affects us all. Drawing has remained a primary activity for the artist since the late eighties. The practice is diaristic - observing the passage of time and documenting the intensely personal, the mundane and the overlooked. Hodges has stated: "It always starts inside my body, and I use drawing as a way of getting it out". From 2013 to 2015 Hodges was the subject of a major touring retrospective, 'Give More Than You Take', which started in Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas and toured to Walker Arts Centre, Minneapolis; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA. From April to September 2019 'Unearthed', a monumental tree stump cast in bronze, was installed at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, USA. In 2016 a text-based sculpture 'With Liberty and Justice For All' was installed on the exterior of the new building at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, USA and is now permanently installed on the roof of the Contemporary Austin, Austin TX.

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