Without question, Carmen Maria Machado is best known for her writing; just three years after the publication of her critically celebrated short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, Machado’s 2019 memoir, In the Dream House, won the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction.
This week, however, the Pennsylvania-born author celebrated the opening of “The Object of Power is Power,” an exhibition of the work of contemporary Cuban artist Rocío García that Machado curated for New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.
“I do not have any kind of educational background in visual art, so it’s funny that I’ve been doing a lot of collaborations with visual artists over the last decade,” Machado tells me as we walk through the spacious, light-filled gallery at the Leslie-Lohman that currently houses about a dozen of García’s works. “It’s not me coming at it from the perspective of an art historian or something, it’s more me asking: What is my creative response to this work?”
Themes of power, pain, desire, sexuality, and fear animate much of Machado’s work as well as García’s, making a multimedia collaboration between the two creatives feel especially apropos. Machado, who is also of Cuban descent, notes that while working with García, who lives in Havana, posed certain logistical challenges—“since bringing stuff out of Cuba is pretty hard right now”—encountering the artist’s work in person was a revelation.
“This guy is Jack the Punisher, and he reappears in another series over here,” Machado tells me of a BDSM-clad figure on one wall of the exhibition. “Rocío has such a narrative, the art almost feels closer to a short story collection or something.”
Fans of Machado’s singular, knife-sharp writing voice won’t be disappointed by the text she’s contributed to García’s show, which reads, in part: “How many times have you begged someone to tie you up? How many times have you begged someone to untie you? Why do pleasure and terror hover so close together in the blue light? Why do we insist on love laced with suspicion?”
“The Object of Power is Power” is on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art through September 20.
