gabrielle civil
My performance art work arrives at the intersection of installation, conceptual art, and poetry. I find or create environments, enter them, and make things happen—with objects, language, landscape, often other people, and always, always my body. Performance art solved a series of problems for me, or rather the main problem of being an over-achieving, under-desired, smart, plump, black girl in America who craved glamour and creation. I started making performance art to cultivate and manifest my presence in the world. From my physical body has burgeoned a black feminist body of art. From this body of art has emerged an evolving chronicle of performance memoirs, dialogues, interactions.
Click on images for videos and critical writings about my work.