Juliana Huxtable is not one to sit idle. Since graduating from Bard College in 2010, she has leapt between various corners of the New York arts scene: as the host of Shock Value, a semiregular transgender-inclusive party; as a model; as a member of the arts collective House of Ladosha; and as a creator and performer who has both D.J.ed and shown work at major museums. Coming off her last art show — an array of off-kilter multimedia work titled “Interfertility Industrial Complex: Snatch the Calf Back” that opened at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York this past fall — her plan was to focus for a bit on her music, traveling the world for D.J. and music gigs she’d lined up in cities ranging from Amsterdam to Novi Sad, Serbia.

Then the pandemic hit, forcing Huxtable, 32, to stay put in Berlin, where she’s lived part time the last couple of years when not in New York or touring — and allowing her to double down (with interludes spent at local protests against racism and police brutality) on one of the more solitary aspects of her practice: writing. In addition to her second book of poetry, she’s assembling what she describes as a part epistolary, mixed-form novel, which builds, she said over a recent Skype call from her Kreuzberg apartment, on the themes of her fall show: “interspecies and trans-species discourse, epigenetics and how that influences identity,” particularly with respect to racial trauma and food. (For inspiration, she’s been reading Leila Taylor’s 2019 book “Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul.”) “I’m thankful I have writing to turn to, because it requires so little but can do so much.”

Source: New York Times

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