On March 16th, 1998, I screened The King of Pop’s New Clothes at Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago as part of Gender Trash & Other Cookies, an evening of queer and sex positive video screenings at Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago.
In The King of Pop’s New Clothes, a reclusive pops star’s drug-fueled attempts at being loved through personal reinvention go horribly wrong when his public and private lives collide. The King of Pop’s New Clothes existed as both a live performance with projected video at the Columbus Drive Performance Space at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and as a video art piece that screened at Randolph Street Gallery.
The screening was part of the Gender Trash & Other Cookies program that I curated with Kathleen “Snatchleen” O’Shea in our personas, Twinkie and Star, The Giovanni Sisters.
From the program:
“We watch a lot of T.V. and have a lot of favorite shows. When the Faeries asked us to curate this video night, we didn’t know what to show, so we picked our friends or people we slept with.”
– Twinkie and Star, The Giovanni Sisters
Video Artists on the program included
- Gregg Bordowitz
- Eugene Shandor
- Ayanna U’Dongo
- Gwynedd
- John Di Stefano
- Jeanine Oleson
- P. Siemer + Larry Steger
- Snatchleen
- Marsian De Lellis
- Fausto Ferños
- Matt Bucy + Jim Jackson
A portion of the proceeds from the screening and festival went to support the Coalition for Positive Sexuality – a pro-sex, pro-queer, pro-choice, pro-girl sex education organization – and to Horizons’ gay and lesbian youth programs
Randolph Street Gallery (RSG), founded in 1979, is Chicago’s largest and most distinguished artist-run center. Internationally recognized for its inventive and prolific programming, RSG is known as an innovative forum presenting alternative multi-disciplinary work that engages the public in art addressing contemporary issues.