Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Performance, Video, Sculpture
Website: xandraibarra.com
Xandra Ibarra is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist originally from the US/Mexico border region of El Paso/Juárez. She holds a BA from Baylor University, an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University, and an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley (2020), where she went on to serve as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art Practice. She has also taught at California College of the Arts, Stanford University, and the San Francisco Art Institute, covering Ethnic Studies, Sexuality Studies, and Contemporary Art History and Theory.
Ibarra has received numerous fellowships and awards including the Creative Capital Award, the Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship, the Eureka Fellowship (Fleishhacker Foundation, 2023), the UC President’s Post-Doctoral Fellowship, the Queer Art Prize for Recent Work, the Art Matters Grant, the NALAC Fund for the Arts, the Eisner Film and Video Prize, the Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award. Her work has been written about in Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Art in America, and ArtNews, and has been examined by scholars including Juana María Rodríguez, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Leticia Alvarado. Beyond her studio practice, Ibarra has been an active community organizer since 2003, participating in INCITE! and Survived and Punished, national feminist organizations addressing state and interpersonal violence.
Ibarra works across performance, video, sculpture, print, and photography to examine abjection and joy—and the contested borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects. Her performances are often durational and endurance-based, deploying her nude body alongside charged props: Tapatío bottles, nipple tassels, cockroach costumes, nylon cocoons, and stereotypical “white lady accoutrements” (blonde hair, ballet shoes, furs, pearls). She created the hyper-sexualized, hyper-racialized persona La Chica Boom in the early 2000s as a vehicle for what she calls “Spictacles”—camp spectacles of Mexican and Mexican-American iconography that render the colonial gaze laughable through burlesque and low-brow humor. Her sculptural practice incorporates gypsum casts, steel, leather, found objects, and archival materials; recurring motifs such as nipple tassels and car tail lights appear in both photographic series and three-dimensional work.
Her practice is deeply engaged with decolonial feminism, queer failure, and sexual subcultures. Ibarra draws on BDSM, burlesque, and Latinx popular culture to complicate representations of race, gender, and sexuality, and she situates her art within feminist anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. The result is a body of work that is simultaneously irreverent, politically sharp, and rigorously theorized.
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