Julie Tolentino

Julie Tolentino is a multidisciplinary artist, activist, and scholar who uses various visual, archival, and movement techniques to craft performance installations. Her practice creates intimate and interdisciplinary environments for movement-based exploration, attending to the ordinary and the queer through activism, somatics, touch, and caregiving. These environments offer non-narrative and multi-sensory experiences through vignette-based serial works or durational projects that traverse internal and external landscapes. The physical actions of her interdisciplinary projects range from the hyper-ordinary to even the nearly invisible, exemplified in the performance installation Honey's "choreography of the throat" or her immersive one-to-one exchanges. Her pieces often invite live exchange and lingering, emphasizing the interdependence shared among fellow wanderers and the disenfranchised. By using time as a method of production and employing sticky materials, improvisation, and live action as threads, Tolentino seeks to open up shared spaces as a host, comrade, participant, and provocateur. In addition to her oeuvre of installation, site-based performance, and interdisciplinary works, Tolentino initiated numerous cultural events in New York City during the 1990s, including the Clit Club, Dagger, Tattooed Love Child, and Puta Scandalosa, as well as the NY Gay Games at Madison Square Garden. ...

Commonwealth and Council is a gallery in Koreatown, Los Angeles founded in 2010. Our program is rooted in our commitment to explore how a community of artists can sustain our co-existence through generosity and hospitality. Commonwealth and Council celebrates our manifold identities and experiences through the shared dialogue of art—championing practices by women, queer, POC, and our ally artists to build counter-histories that reflect our individual and collective realities.