Performance | Creighton Baxter: Blue Language

Join Tufts University Art Galleries and SMFA at 150: Proof of Context in the 21st Century exhibiting artist Creighton Baxter (BFA ‘13) for a performance Blue Language. 

Equal parts monologue, pie eating contest, and game of hide and go seek, Blue Language is the newest performance in the ongoing series Drawings for Eating which develop through the ingestion of images and texts. Whether monochromes, portraits, testimonies, or symbolic compositions similar to tarot cards; the swallowing of these image-objects is framed by the fraught categories of performer and witness in real time and space. 

While the fifteen year-long series was initially conceptualized to critique visual primacy in art; over time Drawings for Eating has considered the vast historical examples of human beings swallowing images and written words. Whether through the banality of embossed baked goods or the eating of artworks and religious texts as a means of attaining knowledge, power, or salvation. For Blue Language, fragmentary narrative elements and live video feed join the iconophagic act to ask us who must carry the burden of evidence? Who do we believe when we cannot see what has been done? 

Note: The performance is experienced in multiple ways intentionally formulated by the artist. The artist will divide audience members into two groups to view live and via live-stream at one point in in the performance, eventually shifting to a procession throughout the building via the stairs (elevators also available, please email galleryaccessibility@tufts.edu with access needs).

Through a practice rooted in drawing and performance, Creighton Baxter (b. Arizona, USA) explores the overlaps between text, gesture, matter, and image. Her live performances of swallowing drawings have been activated at The Geffen Contemporary, Poetry Project, and MoMA; and her installations have appeared at Montserrat College of Art, University of Hartford, and Boston University. Baxter’s drawings have been acquired by the Modern & Contemporary collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum along with numerous private collections. Her illustrations and artworks have been published in Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Impulse Magazine, Art Papers, and The New Yorker amongst others. She has produced exhibition writing for Et al Projects and JB Blunk Estate; and designed the cover artwork for Feminism Against Cisness, edited by Emma Heaney from Duke University Press. Baxter earned her BFA from SMFA at Tufts University, and her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University.

Image: Creighton Baxter, Drawings for Eating, 2022, Performance. Photo by Elon Schoenholz.