Radical Transparency

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Amidst a sea of green, artist Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) lies in her bedroom: each instance of chartreuse, lime, moss, or jade echoing the artist’s name across the room. For her New Museum, New York exhibition Nothing New (2023-2024), the artist replicated her green bedroom in the museum and lived there during the run of the exhibition, making her most private space public. On either side of her replica bedroom, the artist built installations that reflect both places from her past as well as imagined futures: a Zen garden on one end and six potted marijuana plants on the other. “It really feels like a full universe that I’m trying to convey,” says Kuriki-Olivo. “With trans women, in their bedrooms, dreaming up their futures, and possibilities.” In this documentary short, Art21 follows Kuriki-Olivo and her collaborators as they move between the real and the performed, capturing what happens when an artist turns their life into an artwork.

Early in the artist’s practice, her work engaged pop-cultural figures in performances alongside readymade sculptures and installations in galleries, obliquely addressing both the artist’s personal life as well as her social and cultural concerns. While working at The TransLatin@ Coalition, a nonprofit serving transgender, gender non-conforming, and intersex individuals, Kuriki-Olivo began to consider how she could integrate her artistic practice and her social work. The resulting exhibitions facilitated services like free HIV testing and forefronted transgender and queer experiences. 

Now in her replica bedroom at the New Museum, the artist is exposed to the curious gazes of museumgoers through a glass wall separating the installation and the museum lobby, mirroring the hypervisibility and surveillance of transgender people in daily life. However, Kuriki-Olivo takes control of her visibility in Nothing New through alternating gestures of denial and generosity. One tool is what the artist calls “the power,” a button that allows her to quickly fog and defog the glass, hiding and revealing herself at will. In addition, Kuriki-Olivo invited others to share the space and organized an evening of performance at the museum, giving greater visibility to her collaborators like Lexii’Foxx and Alethia Israel Ramos (AiR) from the House of Transcendence. Reflecting on how her life has transformed since she was a child in Dallas, Texas, the artist shares how her relationship to performance has changed, no longer a tool for hiding but instead a space to embrace who she really is.

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