Julie Tolentino is a visual and performance artist, dancer, and choreographer. Her work is influenced from an array of visual, archival, and movement strategies.[1] Tolentino uses she/they pronouns interchangeably. [2]
Tolentino was born in San Francisco to a Filipino father and Salvadoran mother with two sisters by blood, three stepsiblings and with a large extended family. She began formal dance training in ballet, modern, jazz and Contemporary dance, as well as Afro-Haitian and Flamenco. After brief enrollment in San Francisco State University, Tolentino moved to Los Angeles to attend a prestigious dance school. [3]Inthe 1980s, Tolentino moved to New York where she lived for twenty-five years, and then moved to the Mojave Desert and created an off-grid house/studio.[4]
Tolentino was a member of the activist group ACT UP and appeared in the 1989『Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do』campaign with Lola Flash by the AIDS awareness artist-activist collective Gran Fury.[5][6] Tolentino posed with Madonna in a series of homo-erotic photos in the book, SEX,[7][8] and was a featured artist for an artist book by Rodarte photographed by Catherine Opie.[9]
Tolentino co-founded the Clit Club, a queer and pro-sex lesbian nightclub which was operational from 1990–2012 which threw extravagant parties every Friday night in the Meatpacking district of New York City.[10] The club was referenced by Primus on their song “De Anza Jig.”
From 1990–1999, Tolentino regularly danced in David Roussève's Dance Theatre Company, 'Reality.[11]
Tolentino performed an autobiographical performance entitled Mestiza – Que Bonitos Ojos Tienes in 1998 which detailed the boundaries of white western belonging through the eyes of a mixed-race mestiza. [12]
Since 1998, Tolentino has presented solo and group installations and performance work at the New Museum, PARTICIPANT INC, The Kitchen, and Performa, New York;[13] the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin;[14] La Batofar, Paris, France; Momenta and Monkey Town Gallery; Madre Museo, Naples, Italy; Walker Arts Center;[15] and at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. [16]
In 2008, Tolentino and Athey ran a ten day program called PRAXIS Mojave that involved their collaboration with seven other performers and artists in an intense training of performance art and conception of new works.[17]
Tolentino and Athey collaborated around reimagined queer performance, most notably from 2008 to 2011 with THE SKY REMAINS THE SAME: Julie Tolentino Archives Ron Athey's Self-Obliteration #1. Both artists performed in the piece that examined misogynistic, homophobic, and capitalist societal structures at The New York Museum, New York. Its performance was unprecedented in its focus on artist-to-artist connection and solidified a fierce mutual collaboration and friendship between Tolentino and Athey in the public eye. [18]
On November 23, 2013, Tolentino performed in the archiving of WEIGHTED, a piece originally created and performed by John Lovett and Alessandro Codagnone in 2010. She performed the piece alongside Stosh Fila and Walter Dundervill.[19]
Inlater 2013, Tolentino staged the solo exhibition Raised by WolvesatCommonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, which included over 50 intimate, interactive performances alongside a series of site-specific sculptures.[20] In 2019, the artist mounted her second exhibition at the Koreatown gallery, REPEATER, an "immersive installation incorporating sculpture, video, and 108 hours of performance."[21]
The artist performed in the space every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from noon to six. The room was darkened with white carpet. Objects occasionally used in performance were spread throughout the room including a sawhorse covered in black latex gloves, mirrors on casters, wire sculptures, etched mirror cubes, and large neoprene bags.[22][23]
Tolentino was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. For the exhibition they collaborated with Ivy Kwan Arce to create a work with glass orbs, satellites, and performance.[24][25][26] [27][28]
She is an AIDS activist, caregiver, events coordinator, and prominent supporter of lesbian visibility as a self-identified lesbian. [29] In her own words, "My work has an inherent base in the experience of being a survivor, activist, and friend/helper/caregiver ... as I focus on the accumulation of 'small' moments and the simplicity, tenderness, reverence of these experiences as well as how they grow into sometimes overwhelming and chaotic times."[30]
Tolentino co-wrote the Lesbian AIDS Project's Women's Safer Sex Handbook, and was a founding member of ACT UP New York's House of Color Video Collective.
Currently, she is the Provocations co-editor for The Drama Review (TDR) with MIT Press.[31]
Category:Living people
Category:American choreographers
Category:American performance artists
Category:American female dancers
Category:Dancers from California
Category:Year of birth missing (living people)
Category:21st-century American women artists
Category:21st-century American artists
Category:American artists of Filipino descent
Category:American people of Salvadoran descent
Category:Artists from San Francisco
Category:American women performance artists
- Replaced Reference 8 from an expired fan website (allaboutmadonna.com) to another academic source that vouches for the same idea as the aforementioned inactive site.
- Updated broken link in Reference 9. Found archived version of the website that is no longer active. Could not find any other academic sourcing to replace the link with. (The Art of Rodarte)
- Removed broken link on "Clit Club" and replaced with an additional reference to cite its existence in another way.
- Updated Reference 11 from expired website (https://artistswithaids.org/dance/catalogue/tolentino.html) to archived version of page instead of replacing. Direct quotation made locating other sources with identical content difficult to find.
- Replaced Reference 12 "The Drama Review" to "Performa/Reperforma" with a more updated version of the URL and proper associated citation in the section.
- Moved information about lesbian advocacy away from larger discussion of art exhibitions or showings listed.
- Added information from the two books I found from Kohler: Performa 13 and Queer Communion
- Added information from a GLQ article that Tolentino wrote and an article by Pakis
- Added information from an Interview kept at the Smithsonian website and article from the Journal of Curtatorial Studies
- Added information from an Interview with Tolentino from 2018
- Reference 2, 3, 10, 12, 17, 18, 19, 29
Guerilla Guide to Performance Art : How to Make a Living As an Artist (online)
Whitney Biennial 2022 : quiet as it's kept
Kissing Doesn't Kill ACT UP Bus Open Source Image with Lola Flash*
Not once did I ever think that I'd somehow be editing a Wikipedia page.
There's been a million different casual conversational references to Wikipedia being fair game for anyone with a little bit of knowledge to edit. However, I didn't think it could quite escalate to the level of an edit-a-thon that organizations like Art + Feminism will orchestrate and mobilize in different locations across the country. They aim to close gaps in platforms like Wikipedia in articles relating to gender, feminism and the arts [1].
At a large event scale and at an individual level, I very much like the idea of being able to proofread others' work and having the features in Wikipedia's Sandbox to easily cite my sources and collaborate with other users to better the greater database. I can recognize that this plethora of Wikipedia articles could be traced back to Western culture and the idea that English speaking cultures (and their primary contributors to English Wikipedia) may be on equal footing to other Eastern countries technologically and economically, but they face differ in knowledge distribution and circulation [2].
On an individual level, I think I may be of use to the class in this project. Technical literacy is a skill that I developed in high school through a few computer science and coding classes.
