Vaginal Davis is giggling profusely, dressed in a turquoise dress adorned with photographs of her smiling face. The artist, performer, filmmaker, songwriter, gossip monger and downright queer icon is the subject of her first major international solo exhibition, across six institutions on the Stockholm archipelago in Sweden. At the press view of Magnificent Product at Moderna Museet on Skeppsholmen island though, Davis confesses she rarely looks back on her career and is surprised to find that others have kept hold of the ephemera she did not think to save.

Davis burst onto the Los Angeles scene during the punk and post-punk eras of the 1970s and early 1980s, performing with art bands like the Afro Sisters in sweaty Silverlake nightclubs. The daughter of a Black Creole mother named Mary Magdalene DuPlantier and a Mexican father (who apparently met Mary once under a table at a Ray Charles concert), Davis was born intersex and raised by women. She named herself after the American black activist Angela Davis but has appeared in a myriad of identities, from a teenage Chicana popstar to the drag king Buster Beauté.

Davis has always been something of an outsider: “too gay for the punk scene and too punk for the gay scene,” as she would say. She has delighted in poking fun at the conservative aspects of both with her particular brand of “terrorist drag.” However, it was the punks who embraced her experimental streak and when the scene turned more macho in the mid-1980s, Davis became a founding figure of a more inclusive Queercore movement.

It seems that the art world is finally ready to induct Davis into the mainstream. And why Stockholm, you might ask? The answer lies with Moderna Museet curator for international contemporary art, Hendrik Folkerts, who galvanised the takeover (not a retrospective, but a “revisit” Davis insists). Yet, there is a glorious friction between Davis’ unfiltered personality and the Swedish reserve.

The title Magnificent Product pays homage to a black hair product from one of Davis’ favourite wig stores on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. The show opens with a reimagining of the now defunct Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard, with three distinct spaces—a nightclub, a cinema and a church, where we might hear the gospel according to Davis. Among the renowned films presented are That Fertile Feeling (1983), in which Fertile LaToyah Jackson gives birth to “eleven-tuplets” and then rides off on a skateboard, and the dark caricature of right-wing extremism, The White to Be Angry (1999).

The second gallery contains a new version of the installation HAG—small, contemporary haggard (2012/24), in honour of Davis’ apartment gallery on the Sunset Strip, where she would host parties supposedly with the intent of finding a boyfriend (1982–89). The final gallery is occupied by The Wicked Pavilion (2021/22), named for Dawn Powell’s eponymous 1954 novel centred on the love lives of New York society. Pink gossamer curtains and walls lead the way through this fleshy space adorned with paintings and writings and a Fantasia Library of imaginary books. At the epicentre is a tweenager’s bedroom, ruled over by a giant dildo which lies in a bed that slowly rotates—a playful symbol of frustrated teenage desires.

Each of the exhibitions around Stockholm reflects the DNA of its host institution. Naked on my Ozgoad: Fausthaus – Anal Deep Throat in the Old Library of the National Museum explores Davis’ paintings made from cosmetics and her love of the Oz series by L. Frank Baum.

At Accelerator, in an old underground laboratory for research in accelerator physics, the focus is Davis’ work with the Berlin-based CHEAP performance collective, including long-time members Daniel Hendrickson, Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel. Davis joined their ranks in 2001 before moving to Berlin in 2005. Choose Mutation is a testament to the collaborative nature of Davis’ practice, featuring a number of photographs by Annette Frick of CHEAP’s members and early projects like the CHEAP Klub. An accompanying film is filled with reference to division and transformation in the post-COVID world, as well as the relative conservatism of the gay scene in Berlin in the early 2000s.

Meanwhile, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation on Kungsholmen island addresses Davis’ writings as a chronicler, journalist, novelist and gossip columnist in HOFPFISTEREI (the name of a German bakery chain by the way). An astonishing collection of the zines Davis made in the 1980s and 1990s from a Xerox machine at UCLA, where she had a day job in the Placement and Career Planning Center, have been gathered, including Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine and Crude. Disciples can also scroll back through Davis’ blog, Speaking from the Diaphragm, and decades’ worth of reviews and salacious gossip that culminate with Davis’ adventures in Stockholm. The stellar research behind this show lays the foundation for an important archive.

Later in September, Moderna Dansteatern will screen versions of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz and Miloš Forman’s Hair annotated by Davis and Tensta Konsthall will host an art festival.

This constellation of exhibitions initiates visitors into the marvellous world of Vaginal Davis and sees her graduate from outsider to art world darling. It’s curious though to remember that Davis has not always considered herself an artist and she has only fairly recently begun to work with galleries such as New Discretions in New York (previously Invisible Exports), Adams and Ollman in Portland and Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin. Now, the zines, paintings, posters, films, installations—the list goes on—that she felt such an urgent need to make are being preserved with museum-worthy care.

Davis might not have imagined these works would end up in the hallowed halls of international museums, but Magnificent Product sets the tone for a new appreciation of her life and career. This is Vaginal Davis’ world after all and we are just living in it.

As the international LGBTQIA+ community continues to march boldly forward, with greater visibility and advocacy than ever before, it continues to make original art that tells important stories. And we at STIR are always listening, eager to bring you more voices in the years ahead. Happy Pride Month!