Xandra Ibarra

Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based visual and performance artist from the US/Mexico border of El Paso/Juarez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects.

Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), The Broad Museum (LA), ExTeresa Arte Actual (DF, Mexico), The Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC) and Anderson Collection (Stanford) to name a few. She has been awarded the UC President’s PostDoctoral Fellowship, the Lucas Visual Arts and Eureka Arts Fellowships. She is a Creative Capital awardee and received the Queer Art Prize for Recent Work, Art Matters Grant, NALAC Fund for the Arts, Eisner Film and Video Prize, Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award. Her work has been featured in Frieze Magazine, Artforum, Paper Magazine, Hyperallergic, ArtNews and in various academic journals nationally and internationally.

Ibarra’s work has also been featured in several recent and forthcoming books. Her work is discussed in In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance by Amelia Jones and included in the book Saturation: Race, Art & The Circulation of Value edited by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp. Juana Maria Rodriguez’s Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings features her performance I am your Puppet (2007) while Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sexual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance includes a chapter about Ibarra’s collaboration with performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson, Untitled Fucking (2013). Leticia Alvarado’s Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production features Ibarra’s performance work Skins/Less Here (2015) on the cover and within the book.

As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within feminist anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she actively participated in organizing with INCITE!, a national feminist of color organization dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of state and interpersonal violence. She is currently a member of Survived and Punished California. As a lecturer, Ibarra has taught Art Practice, Ethnic Studies, Sexuality Studies, and History and Theory of Contemporary Art courses. Adjunct and part-time teaching posts have included: Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco Art Institute, and California College of the Arts. Ibarra holds an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and attended the Post-Colonial Studies program held at the Universidat Rovira | Virgili (Spain).