“Whimsy, whimsy, and more whimsy—that’s always been my aesthetic choice,”Vaginal Davis says, her voice soaring with joy at the very thought of it. After a whirlwind trip to launch the installation of her seminal 1999 work, The White to Be Angry, at the Art Institute of Chicago and a series of standing-room only events, Davis has finally returned to her home in Berlin, where she has lived since 2005.
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“I don’t like to be dogmatic, didactic, or preachy because people don’t really listen. I’m an around the way girl, that’s what I am,” Davis says, tapping into her South Central, Los Angeles roots. A true American original, Davis’s origin story is the stuff of legend. Her mother, a Black Creole “femme lesbian separatist” then 45 years old, met her father, a Mexican-American Jew in his 20s, just once. Davis was conceived during a Ray Charles concert at the Hollywood Palladium in the early 1960s. Born intersex, Davis’s mother rejected the doctors’ orders that she choose a single sex for her child, allowing her the freedom to be both.
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Coming of age in the heady days of 1970s West Coast punk, Davis took her name in homage to activist Angela Davis, schooling the clueless like a true revolutionary on every front. The originator of the homo-core punk movementand a gender-queer art music icon, Davis rose to underground stardom while taking on a diverse array of personas while performing with art bands including Black F*g, Cholita! The Female Menudo, the Afro Sisters, and Pedro Muriel and Ester (PME).
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