Queer Vibrant Matters: Remarks on Nick Cave's Community Engagements

Abstract

Nick Cave, African American performance artist, enlivens and engages the communities involved in his art practice. Cave attends to subaltern subject positions—as they pertain to power dynamics, media, class, consumerism, race, and sexuality in specific environments—through installations and community interventions that examine how racist and homophobic notions are (re)produced and frame Black others. In this essay, I explore his 2016-2017 epic community project, Until, through the lens of new materialism in order to reveal the pedagogical possibilities of including Cave’s work in critical race and queer studies art curricula.