Brown Arts

Julie Tolentino is a Filipinx-Salvadoran artist whose practice extends across durational performance, movement, installation, sculpture, video, and sound. Over the past three  decades, she/they have created work occupying the interstitial spaces of relationality and memory, race and empire, sexuality and the archive. Her projects across media are drawn in intimate response to the rich learning spaces of activism, underground nightlife, loss, and caregiving. Most recently, her installation and performance-based projects HOLD TIGHT GENTLY and ECHO POSITION (created in collaboration with Ivy Kwan Arce) were featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Her work has also been exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), The New Museum, Performance Space New York, The Kitchen, Performa ’05 and’13, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Aspen Art Museum, House of World Cultures/Berlin, Theaterworks Singapore, and the Thessaloniki Biennial, among many other venues.
 

Collaboration has long been a cornerstone of Tolentino’s practice, which has encompassed projects developed with artists including Stosh Fila, Robert Crouch, Kia Labeija, Jonathan Berger, Ron Athey, and David Roussève, among others. A member of ACT-UP, Art Positive, and the House of Color Video Collective, Tolentino also founded and led the Clit Club, the legendary lesbian/queer/punk performance party that ran from 1990 to 2002. Their interdisciplinary curatorial and publication projects have included Movements in Blue with the What Would An HIV Doula Do? Collective; The Lesbian AIDS Project Women’s Safer Sex Handbook with Cynthia Madansky; and Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art By Women, a restaging of the pivotal 1993 exhibition originally curated by artist Ellen Cantor. Since 2006 she has been engaged in the creation and exhibition of The Sky Remains The Same, a lifelong project to “archive” works of durational and performance art by Tolentino’s friends, peers, and collaborators through reperformance and other strategies of embodiment.

Tolentino is a recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, a Queer | Art Sustained Achievement Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts in Performance, a MacDowell Fellowship, as well as major support from Art Matters Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation Award. Since 2012, Tolentino has been the editor of the Provocations section of the performance studies journal TDR: The Drama Review. She holds an MFA in Experimental Choreography from the University of California at Riverside and is currently core faculty at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts.)
 

She/They are represented by Commonwealth & Council Gallery in Los Angeles and Mexico City and resides between LA and Joshua Tree.