The White to be Angry

Vaginal Davis’s touchstone work, The White to be Angry, challenges white supremacy culture in the United States through irony and pastiche. Davis is a key figure in the history of queer music, performance, and video art, whose work bridged the queer performance and punk club scenes of Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Adopting the last name of activist Angela Davis, the artist created her own mythology during the live performances of her “multiracial, maxi-gendered” bands—a tension between identity, fiction, and societal critique that also informs Davis’s influential xeroxed print publications (or zines), as well as her later video work and drawings. The White to be Angry is a visual album in which each song functions as a chapter.