Indigenous Drag Excellence

Indigenous Drag Excellence
Performance and conversation
📅 22 Feb 2025, 6-9pm
📍 Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art
26 Wooster St, New York

The event is free of charge. Please RSVP here to reserve your seat!

Join us on the 22nd of February, when Aunty Tamara, Feather Talia, Randy River and Ritni Tears bring unapologetically queer and Indigenous drag to the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art! The performance is followed by a roundtable conversation with the artists on queer Indigenous joy, the fluidity of gender expression and sexuality through art and storytelling, and methodologies of honoring Indigenous experience on this land and abroad. The discussion is moderated by local transmedia performance artist and educator MX Oops.

The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art is pleased to showcase this constellation of performers for the US premier of Indigenous Drag Excellence following their presentation at the Riddu Riđđu International Indigenous Festival, the multi-day open-air festival taking place annually in the territory of the Sámi peoples in Norway, in July 2024.

The project is realized with support from the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, the Finnish-Norwegian Cultural Institute, Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, and the Nordic Council of Ministers.

Accessibility
CART Captioning or ASL can be made available on request. Five external steps lead to our entrance doors: a wheelchair lift is available. All galleries are wheelchair-accessible, and a single-occupancy accessible restroom is located behind the visitor services desk: all restrooms are gender-neutral. Large print didactics are available.

For all questions or access requests, please email info@leslielohman.org with 1 week advance of your visit.

Ritni Tears is a Deanu river Sámi drag king, storyteller, and all-around gay™ superstar. Known for his electrifying dance moves, intense facial expressions, and an unshakable love for heavy metal joik and gay boys, he effortlessly blends raw energy with heartfelt storytelling. Whether commanding the stage or captivating audiences with his unique artistry, Ritni Tears is a force to be reckoned with—bold, unapologetic, and utterly unforgettable.

Aunty Tamara is fierce, ferocious and fabulous all in one. A true power house performer, bringing the classics of soul and RnB like a true diva! Aunty pulls performance inspiration from her ancestral roots of Aotearoa, New Zealand - bringing that cultural flame to drag, unapologetically! She stands proud in her culture as a Māori, whilst standing tall in her 8" heels. Get ready to feel all the emotions as you witness the power and combination of DRAG x CULTURE!

Randy River is a drag king from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and is a registered member of Couchiching First Nation in Treaty 3 territory. Randy satirically shines a light on toxic masculinity in the late 90s and early 2000s, and his favourite pastimes include (but are not limited to) wheeling around town on his Heely's, listening to nü metal, and drinking Monster energy drinks for breakfast. He's the uncle we all love to hate!

Feather Talia is the pride of Muskowekwan First Nation and a well-known drag artist and advocate for her kin. Feather, being Two-Spirit, shares her storytelling and fun humour on and off the mic. She has a fire that no one can tarnish and dance moves that are... ok. When you come to a Feather Talia Show, you will get beauty, grace, stupidity and most of all... a fun auntie who thrives and does her own thing!

MX Oops is a transmedia performance artist and educator whose work centers hybridity, encouraging ecstatic disobedience as a path toward embodied wellness. Their interdisciplinary practice combines dance, video design, costume/textile design, djing, rap, and guided meditation. Through this multisensory approach, their work questions whether consciousness itself is the primary medium. The party is the point of departure, a queer site of transnational Afro-diasporic imagining. MX is the founder of Complex Stability, a research and multimedia production company, and an assistant professor in the Dance Program in Lehman College's Department of Music, Multimedia, Theatre & Dance.

Riddu Riđđu Festival is an international Indigenous festival, which annually takes place in Gáivuotna in Northern Norway. For more than 30 years, Riddu Riđđu has worked to create a stronger awareness and pride about the Sámi. In 2024, the festival put a spin on their annual project “Northern people of the year” by choosing to honor Queer Indigenous and invited LGBTQ2S+ artists and knowledge keepers as the festivals. The commission project “Indigenous Drag Excellence XXL” was part of this celebration.

The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (LLMA) is the only art museum in the world dedicated to artistic exploration through multi-faceted queer perspectives. With a collection that includes over 25,000 objects spanning three centuries of queer art, LLMA embraces the power of the arts to inspire, explore, and foster understanding of the rich diversity of LGBTQIA+ experiences.

Indigenous Drag Excellence is organized collaboratively by Riddu Riđđu Festival, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and the Finnish-Norwegian Cultural Institute as part of the pARTir initiative funded by the EU – NextGenerationEU. The project is also funded by Nordic Culture Point and the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.