Dr Vaginal Davis as the Most High Reverend Saint Salicia Tate [performance invitation]

San Francisco: The Women’s Building, 1991. Offset. 4 ½ x 5 ½ in. Very good. Item #10460

Postcard invitation for Vaginal Davis’ early performance at The Women’s Building in San Francisco, where she performed as “the high reverent Saint Salicia Tate,” an evangelical churchwoman who preached Fornication no! Theocracy yes!

Vaginal Davis is an artist and performer based in Los Angeles who performs what the late art-critic Jose Esteban Muñoz called “terrorist drag,” be it in punk music, video work, sculpture work, or live performance. She was born intersex and grew up in an L.A. household that she called a “Druid Wiccan witches’ coven.” 

There, her family affirmed her feminine identity in contra-distinction to the male label assigned to her by doctors. She came up in the L.A. punk scene in a band called Afro Sisters. Her performance identity involved funny and contradictory multiples: a revolutionary Black drag queen, a teen-age Chicana popstar, a white-supremacist militiaman. She has said she was too gay for the punks, and too punk for the gays. Davis is the subject of a traveling retrospective, now at MoMA PS1. 

 

Not located in OCLC as of October 2025.

Sold