Xara Thustra: Stop Men
Episode 57
Bay Area queer artist and activist who defies categories with their anti-capitalist and revolutionary art.
Xara Thustra is a Bay Area queer artist and activist who defies categories with their anti-capitalist and revolutionary art. Since moving to San Francisco in 1995, Xara, a self-taught, and hard-working artist, cast spells with their giant, colorful graffiti on rooftops and in the streets calling for: Heart Over Capital, No More Prisons, Stop America and Free The Free. At the height of the dot-com boom, Xara created posters and banners with powerful political imagery for Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition and organized art auctions raising 10’s of thousands of dollars for the Coalition on Homelessness.
Xara has shown their work in galleries, museums and various underground spaces including Needles and Pens, Adobe Books,
YBCA’s Bay Area Now exhibit, SF MOMA, Berkley art museum and painted murals on Clarion Alley and SF queer bar El Rio and many more touring cross country. Xara has often challenged and refused the art world’s cooptation and commodification instead using their art to support and build community networks of care. In 2015, Xara had a solo retrospective show at The Lab where the entire exhibit of hundreds of pieces of artwork were auctioned off to benefit queer elder and activist Kaye “Nana” Griffin.
Now residing in Oakland, Xara paired up with artist Monica Canilao to form MCXT, a creative partnership making collaborative work that is both magical and rooted in their diy and radical principles. MCXT have painted murals internationally celebrating queer spaces in New York, Mexico and at SF’s historic queer bar The Stud. Last Fall, their first large-scale museum exhibition Infinite Other opened at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History showing work they created together over 18 months. Using intricately layered drawings, paintings, recycled materials and installation, MCXT created a deeply heartfelt and radically joyful incantation for reimagining love, the sacred, and the connection between personal and shared stories.