The Plague Archives at the de Saisset Museum, January 28-June 14!

The Plague Archives is a site-specific installation comprised of multiple video projections, audio installations, performances, and a dense collection of archival material on the social, cultural, and political histories of epidemics and outbreaks. The viewer walks into an immersive Wunderkammer of malady: to experience how people in circumstances of mass illness have negotiated their fear and suffering—their political, economic, and spiritual realities—their class and racial bigotries. To not just learn history, but to feel history.

The Plague Archive began as a quarantine sanity project. In the first weeks of lockdown in 2020, I began posting to Instagram one image from the history of epidemics and outbreaks every day. Diving into the past as our present was unfolding anchored me in how our so-called “unprecedented” COVID moment was profoundly precedented. It became an On Kawara-style endurance performance, a daily discipline in engaging with history.

Curated by Ciara Ennis, the first iteration of The Plague Archives was at Pitzer Art Galleries in early 2023. An expanded version of the show opened in January 25 at the De Saisset Museum in Santa Clara, where it will run until June 2025; including a performance of lecture-demonstration, The Dancing Plagues.

The Plague Archives on Instagram. Audio excerpt from The Dancing Plagues. Below: images from The Plague Archives at the De Saisset Museum, 2025 (Photo credits: Adam Hays, Maya Gurantz, Elizabeth Goodman), including from the performance of The Dancing Plagues (Photo credit: Hok Leung).

Images from Pitzer installation (January-March 2023) and The Dancing Plagues at 2220Arts (October 2021)I also performed the lecture-demonstration of The Dancing Plagues at 2220Arts, presented by The Public School LA.