Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a Mexican/Chicano performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. Gómez-Peña has created work in multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, photography and installation art. His fifteen books include essays, experimental poetry, performance scripts, photographs and chronicles in both English, Spanish and Spanglish. He is a founding member of the pioneering art collective Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (1985-1992) and artistic director of the performance art troupe La Pocha Nostra.

Gómez-Peña has contributed to cultural debates for over 30 years staging seminal performance art pieces including Border Brujo (1988-1989), Couple in The Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (with Coco Fusco, 1992–93), The Cruci-fiction Project (with Roberto Sifuentes, 1994), Temple of Confessions (1995), The Mexterminator Project (1997–99), The Living Museum of Fetishized Identities (1999-2002), The Mapa/Corpo series (2004-2013) and most recently the border opera We Are All Aliens (2018–present).

Gomez-Pena received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1991 for his work as a writer and interdisciplinary artist.

Biography

Early life

Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City in 1955. He studied Linguistics and Latin American Literature at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) from 1974–1978. He moved to the US in 1978 and studied at California Institute of the Arts, earning a B.F.A. in 1981 and an M.F.A. in 1983.

alt=Guillermo Gomez Pena posing with a heart to his chest in a vibrant red room.|left|thumb|333x333px|Naftazteca is Guillermo Gomez Pena

La Pocha Nostra

Gómez-Peña is the artistic director of the international performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. La Pocha Nostra is a trans-disciplinary arts organization that provides a support network and forum for artists of various disciplines, generations and ethnic backgrounds. La Pocha is devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, artist and spectator. La Pocha Nostra has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and generations as an act of radical citizen diplomacy and as a means to create temporary communities of rebel artists. Every year, La Pocha conducts a summer and a winter performance art school in which the troupe's radical pedagogy (body-based methodology that has been developed during the last 20 years) is shared with international groups of rebel artists. In 2019 the troupe performed Enchilada Western: A Living Museum of Fetishized Identities at The PASEO art festival in Taos, New Mexico.

Collaboration with Coco Fusco

Gómez-Peña traveled internationally for two years with fellow artist Coco Fusco performing The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–1994), a satirical performance piece in which the two artists were exhibited in a cage in museums and at arts festivals as "authentic" Amerindians from a previously undiscovered island off the Mexican coast. The pair dressed up in a hodgepodge of ethnic drag and bits of Americana such as a baseball cap and grass skirt in the case of Fusco, face paint and a leopard-skin wrestling mask for Gómez-Peña. Coco Fusco described the piece as "a satirical commentary both on the Quincentenary celebrations and on the history of this practice of exhibiting human beings from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in Europe and the United States in zoos, theaters, and museums." The artists also worked with filmmaker Paula Heredia to create The Couple in the Cage: Guatianaui Odyssey, a documentary that records several performances for The Year of the White Bear as well as viewer reactions to the work.

Collaborations with additional artists

Besides ongoing projects with La Pocha Nostra (Emma Tramposch, Saul Garcia Lopez, Micha Espinoza, Paloma Martinez-Cruz, Balitronica, and Roberto Gomez-Hernandez), Gómez-Peña has made collaboration an integral part of his artistic practice. He thinks of collaboration as a form of “radical citizenship”. Some of his notable collaborative projects include artworks created with: James Luna, Reverend Billy, Tania Bruguera, Annie Sprinkle, Richard Montoya (Culture Clash), René Yañez, Sara Shelton-Mann, VestAndPage, galindog, Post-Commodity and Non-Grata.

Awards and honors

  • The Guggenheim Fellowship, 2019
  • The Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, 2016
  • United States Artists Fellow award, 2012
  • The Free Culture Award, 2012
  • Cineaste Lifetime Achievement Award, 2000
  • The American Book Award for New World Border, 1997
  • Viva Los Artistas Award, 1993
  • John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, 1991. Gómez-Peña was the first Chicano artist to receive this award.