The ICA and the A.R.T. present artist Diana Oh’s latest performance installation, The Artist in Their Element. As Artist-In-Community Resident at A.R.T., Oh and a group of Queer, Non-Binary, and Trans Identified Powerhouse Witches, at the invitation of the artist, will strike a pose for portrait painting that celebrates queer magic and QPTOC love. They’ll each showcase their own personal fashion aesthetic to make history and celebrate their light in a staged tableau at the ICA. Leena Cho will paint their portrait in reverence, and you are invited to observe, muse, sketch, or take in the beauty and applaud! Drawing materials provided; participants also welcome to bring personal sketchbooks and pencils.
The Artist in Their Element is created and staged by Diana Oh in collaboration with artists of the Boston community. The event is the third installment in the artist’s Clairvoyance series.
This event does not include gallery admission.
I often think about who has been given the permission and invitation to pose for portrait painting, an art form that has felt inaccessible to me growing up. I wanted to create the visibility of us inside a historic institution like the Institute of Contemporary Art to reflect a culture of calling in, rather than calling out, to reflect a culture of celebrating and centering identities that I crave to be celebrated and centered for my own lifeline. Posing together, we stand in solidarity with one another. Each of these incredible artists who are posing before you are artists I believe in, whose magic, clarity, and power are vast and trailblazing the way for others to shine. We know by standing together in our truth and power that the impact is undefinable. It is a certain type of ethereal sentience. My hope is that you feel it too and can hold this space in reverence with us.
Diana Oh on The Artist in Their Element
But we have roots further down than you’ve ever known and we are grown. We are grown. Once the clearing passes. We are grown.
Lyrics from “Pure”
About Diana Oh
Diana Oh (she/they) is a witch. She knows it. So do her closest friends. Clairvoyance runs in her family. She went to a spiritual counselor in the jungle in Thailand, and the spiritual counselor told her to sing and go wild in Boston. Everything else the spiritual counselor said came true, so Diana is doing it. She is one of Refinery 29’s Top 14 LGBTQ Influencers, creator of {my lingerie play}, and the first Queer Korean-American interviewed on Korean Broadcast Radio. Upworthy and The Wall Street Journal call her “Badass.” The New York Times calls her “Irreverent.” You can call her “Friend.”
