Freewaves commissioned 25 short videos by 5 different artists addressing gendered reactions to traditional upbringings and current culture as part of the Dis…Miss series, a multi-year, audience engaging exchange about gender, using videos, performance art, and postcards. Screenings, workshops, exhibitions and discussions have occurred and continue in the greater Los Angeles area and beyond. Please consider a screening, discussion or exhibition at your place.  The videos were written, shot and edited by:

Adebukola Bodunrin
Mail Order Brides
Gloria Morán
Meena Nanji
Caress Reeves

Dis…Miss is a multi-year Los Angeles public art series (2016 – 2020) that investigates and celebrates artists’ and audiences’ views on gender through public performance and community engagement. Each Dis…Miss postcard includes a question related to the image that viewers answer anonymously. Viewers are offered 10 possible postcards to choose from and are handed their choice if they answer the question on the back of the image. Answers are gathered, analyzed, visualized and displayed. All Dis…Miss phases are being documented in animated infographics. The included images are by:

April Bey
boychild
Cassils
Chan and Mann
Roya Falahi
Alexandra Grant
Micol Hebron
Thinh Nguyen
Ovarian Psycos
Shizu Saldamando

Freewaves has commissioned Catherine Bell to create infographics based on Marisa Turesky's analysis of the 1200 answers to the Dis...Miss postcard questions.

Catherine Bell is a UX/UI Designer specializing in art museum and fine arts projects. She designs tech to spark a human connection with artifacts of the past and present. Clients have included Barbara Kruger, David Byrne & Brian Eno, Sam Durant, Cassils, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and the Getty Museum. She holds an MFA from CalArts in Photography and Integrated Media.

Julio Salgado is the co-founder of DreamersAdrift.com and project manager for CultureStrike. His status as an undocumented, queer artivist has fueled the contents of his visual art, which depict key individuals and moments of the DREAM Act and migrant rights movement. Undocumented students and allies across the country have used Salgado’s artwork to call attention to the youth-led movement.

His work has been praised by OC Weekly’s Gustavo Arellano, KPCC-FM 89.3’s Multi-American blog and the influential journal ColorLines. In July 2012, Salgado and other undocumented activists joined Jose A. Vargas on the cover of Time Magazine. Salgado graduated from California State Universitiy, Long Beach with a degree in journalism. To see more of his artwork and other collaborations, you can go to juliosalgadoart.com.

Dakota is a Los Angeles-based artist. He uses drawings, paintings, and installations to create animal-human hybrids that explore rural yet fantastical, queer identities. Originally from Bismarck, North Dakota, he graduated with a BFA in Visual Arts in 2015 from the University of North Dakota. In 2017, he received an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. Noot continues to show in both North Dakota and Los Angeles, including solo shows at Highways Performance Space and MuzeuMM. He has exhibited in group shows at Charlie James Gallery, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, and the “Queer Biennial: What if Utopia” at LAST Projects. His series of “Meat Market” drawing-installations have been shown at Cerritos College Art Gallery, Eastside International, and Otis College. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at Oxnard College and Orange Coast College. Noot is a participant in the 2019 TAM FORUM. He was the key artist for the 2018 Slamdance Film Festival.

Amitis Motevalli is an artist born in Iran. She explores the cultural resistance and survival of people living in poverty, conflict and/or war. Through many mediums including, sculpture, video, performance and collaborative public art, her work juxtaposes iconography with iconoclasm. Her work intends to ask questions about violence, occupation and the path to decolonization, while invoking the significance of a secular grassroots struggle. For her current project, Motevalli is working internationally with a broad spectrum of transnational Muslims in order to research what defines home, life and labor in the urgency of survival. She is particularly concerned with conducting workshops with Muslims who come from places of political and religious conflict and collaborating on public art projects. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, exhibiting art internationally as well as organizing to create an active and resistant cultural discourse through information exchange, either in art, pedagogy or organizing artist and educators.

Pato Hebert is an artist, teacher and organizer. His projects have been presented at Beton7 in Athens, PH21 Gallery in Budapest, No Lugar and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Quito, the Songzhuang International Photo Biennale, IHLIA LGBT Heritage in Amsterdam and the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen. He splits time between his studio in Los Angeles, and New York, where he teaches as an Associate Arts Professor in the Department of Art & Public Policy at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Arshia Fatima Haq (born in Hyderabad, India, based in Los Angeles, CA) works across film, visual art, performance and sound. She is interested in counter-archives, speculative documentaries, and the blurred lines between fact and fiction, and is currently exploring themes of embodiment and mysticism, particularly within the Islamic Sufi context. Her body of work stems from the complexities of inhabiting multiple personas – woman, Muslim, immigrant, citizen – and is conceptualized in feminist modes outside of the Western model. Narrative threads include migration, celebration, warfare, nostalgia, homeland, and borders, often within realms of Islamic influence, through both traditional forms and kaleidoscopic reinventions via pop culture. She is the founder of Discostan, a collaborative decolonial project working with cultural production from the SWANA (South and West Asia and North Africa) region.

Haq's work has been featured at Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Broad Museum, LACE, Toronto International Film Festival, MOMA New York, Hammer Museum, LAXArt, Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Pacific Film Archive. Currently, she hosts and produces monthly radio shows on Dublab and NTS, and recently released an album of field recordings from Pakistan on the Sublime Frequencies label. She received her MFA in Film and Video from California Institute of the Arts in 2005, and is a recipient of the California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship, the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, and the Onassis AIR Fellowship.

Marsian De Lellis is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who constructs installations and time-based visual narratives that memorialize obsessional lives. Their work celebrates the stories of unconventional people whose private manias become public fodder for tabloids and reality television. Combining biographical material with their own autobiography becomes a means to channel their own personal struggles into something comprehensible. Through their practice, they investigate embodiment, desire, contemporary forms of animism, and neurodivergence.

Photo credit: William Short

#SNATCHPOWER is a post-apocalyptic, Black Indigenous futuristic, queer liberationist artist collective of humans who are deliberate and fearless. We are diverse in how we define ourselves in terms of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, and religion, but united in our commitment to self-definition, self-expression, self-governance, and non-hierarchical collaboration. We endeavor to subvert the hegemonic mainstream through radical Black Indigenous Queer artistic expression. In coming together to harness the transformative power of this creative energy, we can and will #SNATCHPOWER from those who try to oppress ours.