GAVILÁN RAYNA RUSSOM

Gavilán Rayna Russom is a visionary artist, composer, scholar, and curator based in New York City. Over the past two decades she has produced a complex body of works oriented towards providing alternatives to binary thought and fixed modes of categorization. She identifies her artistic practice as emerging from a “commitment to decolonial praxis that seeks to participate with others in re-making the world through imaginative conversation at depth,” and describes the works that emerge from that practice as “offerings, conversation starters, places from which to gain a different viewpoint, and inspirational prompts for the works of others."

In addition to an extensive discography of recorded music, she has presented solo and collaborative works in performance, video, and installation at international institutions including Moma PS1, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, the São Paulo Biennial, Art Basel, Art Basel Miami, the Donau Festival, Kunsthalle Zürich, Big Ears Festival, Foksall Gallery Foundation, the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances, Chicago Filmmakers, the Museum of Modern Art, Moogfest, E-Flux, Knockdown Center, the Sydney Opera House, and the Hirshorn Museum.

Since her teens, Rayna has been involved with clubs, artist run venues, and other “underground” spaces of artistic exchange and community. She has presented her own work and curated events in and for these spaces over more than thirty years and has consistently advocated for their cultural value in her writing and public speaking.

She was a 2019 artist-in-residence at National Sawdust where she developed a long form performance work entitled Physicality. Her book length text Passageways and Portals, a reflection on her 2020 album Secret Passage about the East Side Rail Tunnel in Providence, Rhode Island, was published as a long-form zine in 2022. Rayna’s 2022 composition Trans Feminist Symphonic Music, released by Longform Editions, was named best experimental music release of that year by both Bandcamp and NPR. She is a resident DJ on Mutant Radio Tbilisi where her show Bodyvision airs every other month, and a resident on The Lot Radio where she shares a monthly offshoot of Bodyvision called Bodyvision West.

Rayna is the founding director of Voluminous Arts, a cultural organization whose mission is to foreground, nurture, and advance the experimental artistic culture of transgender people and communities. Through Voluminous Arts she co-curated and co-directed the summer 2023 residency program Bloom How You Must, Wild Until We Are Free at the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances, as well as the accompanying Cooler Nights experimental performance series and Traces: Sonic and Material closing exhibition.