Nao Bustamante

Nao Bustamante is a Chicana multimedia and performance artist,^[1] from the San Joaquin Valley in California.^[2] Her work encompasses performance art, sculpture, installation and video and explores issues of ethnicity, class, gender, performativity, and the body.^[3] She has performed in galleries, museums, universities and underground sites throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Mexico and the United States.^[4] Her collaborations include working with such luminaries as Coco Fusco and the experimental arts entity Osseus Labyrint.^[5] She has been called "the doyenne of the Bay Area’s underground cultural scene."^[6]:178 She currently serves as Associate Professor and Vice Dean of Art at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. Before this position, she served as Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.^[7] She has exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Art, Sundance, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki.^[8] In 2007, Bustamante was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. Bustamante competed in the first season of Bravo's Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.^[9]

Early life and education

Bustamante was born in California. She first trained in postmodern dance before moving into the realm of performance in the mid-1980s. She holds a BFA/MA from the San Francisco Art Institute.^[7]

Awards

In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman Award and in 2007 was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow as well as a Lambent Fellow.^[4]

Notable Works

• 1992 Indig/urrito: Performance commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Conquest of America during which Bustamante "challenged the white men in the audience to go onstage to express their apologies for the years of oppression of indigenous peoples by eating a piece of a burrito that Bustamante had strapped on to her hips."^[10][11]
• 1992: Rosa Does Joan In arguably her most widely seen 'performance,' Nao created the character of "Rosa" the exhibitionist, to appear on the Joan Rivers Show.^[12]
• 1996-1998: STUFF! with Coco Fusco: Performance which explores sexual and spiritual tourism and its impact on Latin women, based on interviews with Cuban sex workers and child street vendors in Chiapas, Mexico.^[6]:179
• 1995: America the Beautiful: Extended reflection on the social forces that confine and contain feminine creativity, using her own body as a canvas.^[6]:56[13]
• 1998: The Chain South: This was a satire piece focused on the corporate and pop-cultural relations between Mexico and the U.S. Bustamante portrays "Ronaldo McDonaldo." Director Miguel Calderon appears in the piece.^[14]
• 2001: Sparkler: This performance includes Nao posing vulnerably with a sparkler behind her in low light.^[15]
• 2003: Neopolitan: Video installation that includes a loop tape of the artist breaking out into spontaneous sobbing. The TV playing the loop is covered by a multicolored cozy that was crocheted by the artist, among other crocheted items. The installation, according to cultural critic José Esteban Muñoz, is "an illustration of the depressive position and its connection to minoritarian aesthetic and political practice."^[16][17]
• 2006 - 2007: Hero: Multimedia feature-length performance using video. Bustamanate transforms from princess to hag in the course of performance, incorporating video and storytelling.
• 2009: "Given Over to Want"^[18]
• 2010 Silver and Gold: performance at The Sundance Film Festival that began with Bustamante dressed in a beekeepers outfit frolicking through a green forest. The film then progresses, and "things start to happen [...] that can't be described in a family newspaper." ^[19] According to Bustamante the film was a homage to "Maria Montez, the 1940s Dominican film star, and muse and legendary filmmaker, Jack Smith."^[20]
• 2015 Soldadera: Exhibition at the Vincent Prince Art Museum.^[21] Features a documentary film of Bustamante's journey to Guadalaraja to meet 127-year old Soldadera Leandra Becerra Lumbreras, at the time the last survivor of the Mexican revolution. Bustamante also produced a bullet-proof dress titled "Tierra y Libertad - Kevlar 2945" and rebozo inspired by an image of a group of armed women dressed in Edwardian gowns. The dress is worn in a performance captured in the video "Test Shoot" where Bustamante wears the dress as she is fired at with a rifle.

References