Visual Arts Lecture: Keioui Keijaun Thomas
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Visual Arts Lecture Series (VALS)—Fall 2023
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Keioui Keijaun Thomas (she/her) is a Florida-born, New York City-based performance and multimedia artist. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with honors from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Thomas is a 2022 Recipient of the MAP Fund, the inaugural winner of the Queer | Art 2020 Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists, and a Franklin Furnace Fund recipient in 2018.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at The Rhubarb Festival, Toronto, Canada (2023); the Skopje Pride Queer Arts Festival, Skopje, Macedonia (2020); the Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival, Chicago (2016), among others. She has had solo shows at The Knockdown Center, New York (2018) and Harvard University, Cambridge (2018) amongst many others. Her work appeared in group exhibitions including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2018); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2018); to the Broad
Museum, Los Angeles (2017).
According to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, “She creates live performance and multimedia installations that address blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Her performances combine rhapsodic layers of live and recorded voice, slipping between various modes of address, to explore the pleasures and pressures of dependency, care, and support. By centering self and communal care in real-time, Thomas’ practice aims to build bridges of understanding and community.”
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Image: Partitions of Separation and Passing, Human Resources, Los Angeles, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Hector Martinez.