Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, installation, public art
Website: xarathustra.art
Xara Thustra is a self-taught Bay Area queer artist and activist who moved to San Francisco in 1995 and has been based in Oakland for many years. A key figure in San Francisco's Mission School — alongside Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, and Chris Johanson — they built their practice from the ground up in the streets, squats, and underground spaces of the city, developing a visual language rooted in graffiti, screenprinted posters, murals, painting, video, music, performance, and protest. They are a founding member of the radical queer direct action collective Gay Shame. Their 500-page monograph Friendship Between Artists Is an Equation of Love and Survival, self-published in 2013 and distributed by D.A.P./Artbook, surveys fifteen years of their work and collaborations, with contributions from Xylor Jane, Chris Johanson, Barry McGee, Emory Douglas, and Erick Lyle, among others.
Their work has been shown at SFMOMA, the Oakland Museum of California, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, New Image Art in Los Angeles, and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, as well as Needles and Pens, Adobe Books, and numerous underground venues. They have painted murals on Clarion Alley and at San Francisco's historic queer bar El Rio and El Stud. In 2015, they held a solo retrospective at The Lab, San Francisco, in which the entire exhibition of hundreds of works was auctioned off to benefit queer elder and activist Kaye "Nana" Griffin. They are one half of MCXT, a creative partnership with artist Monica Canilao.
Thustra works across painting, graffiti, screenprinting, mural, installation, performance, music, and direct action, refusing to separate art-making from political commitment. Their signature visual language is bold, maximalist, and immediately legible — giant rooftop graffiti calling for "Heart Over Capital," "No More Prisons," and "Stop Men"; hand-lettered posters produced for the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition during the dot-com boom; calendars, banners, and ephemera circulated for free through community networks. Theirs is a practice built on the principle that art should serve the communities it emerges from, not the market, and they have consistently declined to participate in the commodification of their work.
As one half of MCXT with Monica Canilao, Thustra has expanded into large-scale collaborative installations and museum exhibitions, combining their DIY and radical political sensibilities with Canilao's folk-inflected, material-rich visual language. MCXT describes their art as "living and breathing, a mix of thoughts, actions, mediums, time, metals and animals, alongside political riddles, sexiness and inclusivity in a queer storm, a mirrored joy."
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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