Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Collage: Sweet Knead. Joan Gutiérrez 2026.
Photo: Mod Schwalbe. Brooklyn, NY 2026.
Surrendering to the Flowers by 2026 AiR Joan Gutiérrez conjures a cooking “show” where the body is both kitchen and altar. Seven somatic practices are alchemized into recipes whose ingredients are desire, memory, and the erotic wisdom stored in flesh and scar. Footage of Woman shaping earth into bowls, of cactus cut open and onions peeled to their cleanest layers, moves like running water alongside a mythological creature lost in maguey and swamp, narrated by a voice layering breath with the collective intimacy of wanting.
This is an invitation to pause. To stand on a single spot on earth long enough to listen for what voices, ancestral or still in body, might find us here.
Against a culture of restlessness, this work asks: what is it to bare-handedly caress our lostness? Can we allow ourselves to feel the warm spreading relief we were reaching for all along — that place, finally, to rest — before we are consumed by consumption?
This work moves through an initiation of allowing the body to be re-membered. A slow peeling away of the layers of skin that reveal the feral, wide-open eyes of our center. A reckoning with innocence, power, and the places we rarely are permitted to touch.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joan Gutiérrez develops tactile, performative, and participatory works rooted in the desert landscapes of the Mexican-American borderlands where she was raised. Born in 1992—the year the Ciudad Juárez femicides began and Dr. Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery was published—Gutiérrez situates their interdisciplinary practice within this charged socio-political terrain, engaging the body as a site of memory, resistance, and transformation: personal, collective, and planetary.
Rejecting the authority of specialization, Gutiérrez embraces the term Amateur as a radical, queered, and feminized position—one that privileges play, pleasure, and vulnerability as methodologies for transmuting rupture, both intimate and systemic.
Though trained in psychology at Loyola University Chicago and holding a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Gutiérrez’s practice is shaped less by institutional frameworks than by sustained, embodied inquiry—studying independently with artists, somatic sex educators, and masters of Zen and butoh across Europe, Asia, North and South America.
He is based between Chicago and Brooklyn.