Vaginal Davis. The Wicked Pavilion: Tween Bedroom. 2021. Courtesy of MoMA PS1. Photography by Steven Paneccasio.
Walking through Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product at MoMA PS1 is less a traditional exhibition visit and more a radical initiation into an unruly, heartfelt, and defiantly individual cosmos. This comprehensive retrospective immerses viewers in a history of queer punk insurgency, lighthearted criticism, and sophisticated provocation. It covers five decades of Davis’s work as a performer, writer, filmmaker, musician, visual artist, educator, and self-described “Blacktress.” The exhibit is on view through March 2, 2026.
Unlike chronological surveys that trace linear development, this exhibition organizes Davis’s work thematically, drawing connections across time and medium. The diverse rooms pulse with a queer logic that is both unexpected and inevitable: you’re just as likely to encounter riotous humor as you are to be silenced by the profundity of political and personal resonance that lies beneath the surface.
Upon entering, you’re greeted by Naked on my Ozgoad: Fausthaus – Anal Deep Throat, a recent multimedia installation made with Jonathan Berger. The atmosphere of the room, which consists of walls covered in sculptures and images, establishes the tone for the entire exhibition: childhood fantasy refracted through a lifetime of cultural insurgency, bricolage as manifesto.
In HAG — small, contemporary, haggard (2012), Davis reconstructs her long-legendary Sunset Boulevard apartment gallery. The space warps and sways, a playful architectural twist that mirrors the instability and exhilaration of underground art scenes in which Davis was a central figure. It’s here you encounter zines, paintings, and sculptural bread totems that echo both reverence and irreverence for cultural forms.
Perhaps the most talked-about piece — and with good reason — is The Wicked Pavilion: Tween Bedroom (2021). A massive rotating bed bearing a gigantic phallic sculpture occupies a pink-washed room, calling attention to the absurdity of gender fetishism while simultaneously embracing the potency of queer fantasy worlds. In this room, Davis’s irreverence feels like a mirror held up to the art world and to society’s expectations of gender, sexuality, and cultural seriousness.
Throughout, archival materials — from early queer punk footage to magazine spreads and personal memorabilia — remind you that Davis’s practice has always been rooted in community and cultural documentation. There’s a sense of historical earthquake: Davis wasn’t just present in scenes like LA’s queercore; she helped shape their contours, insisting on spaces where “sexual repulsives and freaks” could claim their own expressive and intellectual life.
Visiting the exhibition’s cinema room, you encounter the kinetic energy of Davis’s films from the 1980s and ’90s — works that blend performance, satire, and social critique. These early pieces resist tidy categorization, functioning instead as vibrant detonations of genre: part mockumentary, part drag opera, part lived experience.
What sets Magnificent Product apart is not merely the breadth of Davis’s practice but the emotional and conceptual intelligence that unifies its disparate strands. This is a body of work that is at once deeply rooted in specific communities and histories and wildly attuned to the possibilities of invention and reinvention. Whether through zines you can photocopy yourself or installations that warp your sense of space, the show invites participation, curiosity, and reflection.
Ultimately, Vaginal Davis’s retrospective at MoMA PS1 is a magnificent, maddening, beautifully eccentric tribute — not just to Davis’s singular imagination but to the power of art to destabilize, enchant, and rethink who gets to take up space on museum walls.
