June 3, 2025 |
Juliana Huxtable, 37, is hard to pin down. Aside from her nomadic lifestyle – zipping between cities for gallery shows and DJ gigs alike – she’s also a living, breathing antidote to box-ticking. Despite this, critics still attempt to pigeonhole her as the trans, Black artist. The reality is less simple for the Texas-born It girl. She grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, a conservative upbringing that seems at odds with her avant-garde sensibility. “I can understand why you might find it difficult to feel comfortable in gender expression or being individual in a church context,” she says, video-calling from Chengdu, China, where she’s about to play a DJ set. “But being an artist actually comes from my experience in the church,” she adds, noting the traditions of oration and literary history she discovered on Sundays.
You might know Huxtable from the line-ups at Berghain or orgiastic queer festival Whole, in Berlin and Gräfenhainichen, respectively. Or from her early involvement with the likes of Telfar and Hood By Air. You might even know her from the early days of Shock Value, a night she co-founded in New York to mix up a then-segregated party scene. “There was GHE20G0TH1K, which was the only mixing party, and then everyone cool, whether you were gay or not, just ended up partying at the gay parties because those were the only places that were chill,” she says. Her night, held on the Lower East Side, attracted everyone from “bro rapper friends” through to doll trap rapper Quay Dash. “I’ve always been a gender theory baby,” says Huxtable, who read gender and literature at Bard College in upstate New York. “It uses the lens of gender and sexuality to intentionally mix people.”
Juliana Huxtable, ‘Dancing Tails in Foxxy Desert Tales’, 2024; acrylic, button and vinyl stickers on printed canvas, 152 x 114.6 x 4 cm, photography by Stephen James, courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London
She was also part of the House of LaDosha, the ballroom-adjacent hip-hop troupe headed up by Parsons School of Design alumni Antonio Blair and Adam Radakovich, aka Dosha Devastation and Cunty Crawford. Huxtable booked them to perform at Bard and the three immediately clicked. When she later moved to New York, she was adopted into the collective “My name was Juliana Huxtable LaDosha. That’s where Juliana Huxtable comes from,” she says. Soon, she was making a name for herself, picking up traction on Tumblr, where she could hone her post-internet aesthetics and indulge otherwise niche porn tastes. Eventually, Huxtable dropped the LaDosha but remains tied to the house in an artistic capacity.
In the early 2010s, Huxtable was making her way into the art world, plastering her lyrical poems, such as “I discovered, using my virtual pussy to straddle the beefy trapeziuses of anthropomorphic cyborg attackers, that the awkward shortcomings of pubescent life could be overcome one pelvic head crush at a time” (Untitled, For Stewart, 2012), on fleshy pink backdrops typical of the punk-inflected blogosphere she inhabited. Her real breakthrough came when that poetic nous was applied to performance. There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed (2015), a cybernetic soliloquy that unpicked weighty topics such as capitalism, colonialism and digital futures with downtown sass, was co-commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and Performa and became a watershed moment in her career.
Juliana Huxtable, ‘American Journal of Anthropomorphics’, 2024; acrylic, button and vinyl stickers on printed canvas, 152 x 114.6 x 4 cm, photography by Stephen James, courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London
Huxtable’s flame-ombréd braids and cat-eyed slap betray a fiery and playful personality. She’s quick-witted, moving from critical theory to saucy anecdotes, prioritising pleasure and leisure above all else. Nonetheless, her practice is the real deal. Last October, she reminded London of just this, taking over the East End gallery Project Native Informant with Heads & Tails in the Struggle for Iconicity, an exhibition made up of what she calls ‘fursonas’ – in essence, zoomorphised portraits of friends. Iggy Anarchy shows a clawed, amphibious human morphing into their surroundings, clad only in Speedos. Then there is Pangs, a well-hung avian himbo with dino-spiked hair and a canine mouth. And Arthro Anarchy, the caterpillar-tailed, insectoid human caught mid-scuttle on a domestic triptych.
Sounds a little furry, right? “I 100 per cent consider myself a furry,” confirms Huxtable. “I mean, the first, real pornographic representation that I was like, ‘Ooh, this is doing something for me,’ was furry porn.” As well as plainly titillating her, it’s also, in her eyes, its very own alternative history, complete with an art-historical context. Her penchant for this inter-species hybridity also appears in previous projects, including her show at Berlin’s Fotografiska, entitled Ussyphilia (2023-24), named after the colloquial custom of suffixing anything with ‘-ussy’ so that it becomes an orifice for pleasure. She begins reeling off examples. “With my friends, if you get a wax for trade, you’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m giving dolph-ussy,’” she says. “It’s when it’s squeaky-clean, like a dolphin.” In this sea-themed vein, her show was centrepieced with works like Hiss Play (2022), a tentacled, membranous stylisation of herself, and Wash Fish Face (2023), another self-portrait, this time with dorsal fin and tail.
Juliana Huxtable, ‘Iggy Anarchy’, 2024
While it’s easy to draw direct links between her work and identity, she’s clear that this is little more than a lazy interpretation. She cites her pink half-photo, half-cartoon furry cow being forcefully milked (Cow 3, 2019) and some of the responses it’s garnered. “I don’t know how you could see this image and induce, ‘Oh, it’s about her transition,’” she says. “[That’s] unhinged, psychotic, so dumb.” This rightful annoyance is further complicated by her broader irritation at contemporary discourse surrounding identity politics, even on the left. So the argument goes, the more listicle-adjacent vectors of oppression, such as Blackness, queerness or womanhood, are being prioritised over or at the cost of class politics. Huxtable vehemently disagrees. “At this point, among a certain young, critically aware, educated, somewhat-to-highly literate urban milieu, they’ll roll their eyes and say, ‘Oh, we’re doing the identity thing.’ And I’m like, ‘Everyone is always doing the identity thing.’ Identity politics is how class represents itself.”
Indeed, if anyone is qualified to critique the discrepancies between visibility – often described as the failure of identity politics – and representation, it’s Huxtable. In 2015, a nude, multicoloured statue of her by the artist Frank Benson, Juliana, aired at the triennial at the Lower East Side’s New Museum. The same sculpture would be replicated and sold around the world. Huxtable told us she signed an agreement – while broke and vulnerable – for a relatively meagre £2,400 to sit for Benson, but she did not consent to its myriad reproductions. “I had a friend of a friend who worked at the factory where they were making it and he sent me a photo. I saw at least eight of my naked bodies in an assembly line at this art-production compound,” says Huxtable, who looks visibly shaken by the experience. “I explicitly asked [Benson] if I could have a percentage of the sculpture [royalties], even a small percentage. He talked me out of that.” Later, she was approached at Art Basel by an assistant to an extremely famous artist who thanked her on his behalf, as he had just bought a Juliana. “People come up to me regularly and reference this sculpture as collaborative and they’re so happy [about it],” she says. “I tried to contact Frank. He would avoid me like the plague, just ghosted, and [probably] made millions off my naked body.”
Juliana Huxtable, ‘I Know Your Little Fast Tail Aint Outside Again’, 2024; acrylic, button and vinyl stickers on printed canvas, 152 x 114.6 x 4 cm, photography by Stephen James, courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London; Juliana Huxtable, ‘The War on Proof’, 2017, photography courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NY
After 10 reached out to Benson for comment, he responded: “Juliana was intended to celebrate a uniquely inspiring individual. I consulted her on all major aesthetic decisions; she never asked for a sales percentage. Most of the money went to fabricators. The remainder was split between myself, Sadie Coles HQ and Andrew Kreps Gallery. No one involved made anything close to a million dollars. In 2018, after Juliana posted defamatory comments about the sculpture, I sent her a courteous email to apologise. She never replied, blocked me and ceased contact. I am more than willing to help promote Juliana whenever I can and have always tried to treat her with the utmost respect. I still have immense pride in the sculpture and am grateful for the opportunity to work with her. I hope someday she can see the work in a positive light.”
Huxtable, traumatised by the tagging on social media that these sculptures brought, fled New York for Berlin, where she has been living until recently. “I want to be around weird-ass bitches living fun, interesting, weird-ass lives that centre pleasure and actual eccentricity and not marketing yourself as that,” says Huxtable. “And Berlin was great for that.” Of course, it’s also the club capital of the world and one of the few places where you can sit around and work as little as possible without being castigated by the state. “I love that if a party lasts 12 hours in Berlin, that’s like, ‘Oh cute.’ It’s the first place where I took my tits out. It’s also the first place where I got fucked in a club,” she says.
Julianna Huxtable, ‘Arthropod 1’, 2024
These days, clubbing remains an important part of Huxtable’s life, as does her new-ish rock band, Tongue in the Mind, and her growing interest in film. In 2022, she and the Mancunian artist Hannah Black released Penumbra via the art collective DIS, converting a 2019 performance into a cinematic format for the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2021 in Geneva. During the film, a trippy narrative unfolds. We see video-game characters clad in costumes by Puppets and Puppets undergo trials, picking apart some of Huxtable’s favourite topics: animal vs human and our relationship with law. “That was so fun for me because I already think in that way,” she says. “I think sometimes I experience creative ideas as film, even if I translate them to writing.”
As the interview draws to a close, expedited by the blinking alert for a poor cable connection on Huxtable’s side, the artist lounges on a hotel bed, engaged in our conversation but totally at ease. She’s never rushed and, characteristically, is always in four places at once. “I work for myself and I truly feel such joy to be able to be a citizen of the world as the direct descendant of slaves,” she says. True, she spreads herself far and wide, covering every discipline and base. But she never spreads herself thinly, nor does she come close to packaging her world as a product. “I’m really committed to the idea of freedom, and that means freedom from entrapment into turning myself into a brand.” Fly free, Juliana.
Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 74 – MUSIC, TALENT, CREATIVE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
