Guillermo Gómez-Peña
An indomitable flux permeates the pioneering work of “cyber-punk Chicano” performer Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Toggling just as easily between languages as between gender expressions, stage personas, and artistic genres, the Mexican-American artist navigates and challenges physical, political, and cultural borders. The riveting, collaborative performances he orchestrates can take the form of anything between a Spanglish spoken-word recital and a guerrilla television act. Everything from cultural fetish items and racist memorabilia to robotic arms and a myriad of costumes are featured in Gómez-Peña’s anti-colonial critique of US empire and its racial politics. Itself a combination of sci-fi aesthetics and Mexican and American popular culture, his experimental “ethno-techno art” meditates on the hybrid identities that form within and move across borderlands such as that between the US and Mexico.
Throughout a multifoliate career spent engaging in political theatre, poetic journalism, and radical pedagogy, Gómez-Peña has centered collectivity and community in his work. In 1993, the artist founded the transdisciplinary performance art troupe La Pocha Nostra with Roberto Sifuentes and Nola Mariano. With an ever-fluid cast of members hailing from different generations, ethnic backgrounds, and gender complexities, the group works across photography, video, installation, and performance to tear down the walls between the practice and theory of art, as well as between artist and spectator. The rebel artists work across national borders and identities in practice of a “radical citizen diplomacy.” By breaking down gendered and raced divisions on stage, the group strives to collapse these borders in society at large.
With an increasingly blurred distinction between life and performance art, Gómez-Peña uses his body as a conduit for a cyborg consciousness that simultaneously channels ancient Mayan and Aztec civilizations while projecting tech-powered visions of a more equitable future. Fundamental to both Gómez-Peña’s performance practice and Toward Common Cause is a belief in the vital role art plays in society and its power to radically change it.
—Jad Dahshan
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La Pocha Nostra, Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance art troupe and organization, has developed a pedagogical model that functions both as an act of citizen diplomacy and as a means to create “ephemeral communities” of diverse participants. The basic premise of these collaborations is founded on an ideal: “If we learn to cross borders on stage, we…
Join La Pocha Nostra core troupe members for the virtual Chicago premiere of The San Francisco Living Archives of La Pocha Nostra. Always inciting participation, La Pocha Nostra will present a performative introduction by core members Paloma Martinez-Cruz and Saula Garcia Lopez who will also create a collective poetic action after the film to help…
Public Media Institute (PMI) is the media partner for Toward Common Cause, broadcasting Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files on Lumpen Radio 105.5 FM and Lumpen.TV, and providing live-streaming and other services for virtual programs. PMI is a non-profit, community-based art and culture organization headquartered in the neighborhood of Bridgeport. Its mission is to create, incubate, and sustain…
Guillermo Gómez-Peña returns to Chicago for his first LIVE and in-person performance since lockdown began. This new solo performance monologue features new writing responding to the multiple pandemias including rantings and confessions. This one-night event is presented in dialog with his ongoing experimental radio program presented by Public Media Institute Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files: Audio Art…
Guillermo Gómez-Peña has an obsession with rewriting and restaging so-called “Western Art History” while highlighting colonial legacies of systematic exclusion, demonization and fetishization of Brown, Black, and indigenous bodies. This live radio keynote from Gómez-Peña challenges contemporary art museum practices and calls for an open discussion regarding radical restructuring from within. The keynote is part…
The Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago is a site for rigorous inquiry and exchange that encourages the examination of complex issues through the lens of art objects and artistic practice. Plan your visit Visits to the Smart Museum of Art are free, but reservations are recommended. Open Tuesday–Sunday 10 am–5 pm;…
The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum draws upon the legacy of international peace activist, suffragist, and feminist, Jane Addams, and other social reformers who lived and worked alongside their immigrant neighbors to create social change on the Near West Side of Chicago. Plan your visit By reservation only. Open Tuesday–Friday and Sunday 9 am–5 pm. Gómez-Peña’s…
A year-long series of experimental audio performances from Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a performance artist, writer, activist, and MacArthur Fellow.