Maya Gurantz: The Plague Archives

Maya Gurantz’s interdisciplinary research-based practice incorporates dance, video, performance, text, and installation, which she deploys to examine constructions of race, gender, and class in relation to shared myths, public rituals, and private desires. At the de Saisset Museum, these ideas are manifested in The Plague Archives, a site-specific installation comprising multiple video projections; a dense collection of archival material on the social, cultural, and political histories of epidemics and outbreaks; and an interactive Tracing Board encouraging viewers to map images from the Plague Archives onto the surface. Ephemeral in nature, these tracings dissolve in the process of being drawn, underscoring our historical tendency for collective amnesia—as witnessed by the AIDS crisis, and more recently, our post COVID condition. Predominantly spanning the tenth through the twenty-first century, The Plague Archives presents a multi-layered transhistorical and intercultural discourse on the shifting attitudes and definitions of disease.

Defined by Gurantz as experimental “lecture-performances,” the videos weave connections between disparate narratives associated with plague histories. In Great Men and Sheep, French microbiologist Louis Pasteur, renowned for his breakthrough discoveries on vaccines and pasteurization, is examined in relation to his experiments on sheep. Incorporating visual and textual information spanning a century, the video links various elements in connection with Pasteur: a conspiracy theory conflating vaccine fears with sex; patriarchy and the fiction of male genius; shifting notions of appropriate animal-human relations; and the mythical roots of Jesus as the “good pastor.” 

Alternatively, The Plague Roots of Hate maps the relationship between pandemics and racism across multiple locales. These include the bubonic plague of 1901, and the creation of the first South African townships, which later became a model for the apartheid state. Other aspects of the video examine early twentieth-century typhus outbreaks resulting in humiliating and unnecessary disinfections forced upon Mexican workers in El Paso, which triggered the Bath House Riots of 1919. These mass decontaminations served as inspiration for Nazi doctors in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

The third video Germs and Cinema, maps the time period in which Germ Theory of Disease emerged alongside the birth of film at the dawn of the 20^th century. Early representations of germs and disease on film have produced our understanding of what germs look like. These images continue to influence how we visualize and comprehend disease transmission, the inside of our bodies, medical authority, as well as public health. By linking these narratives, Gurantz underscores how recent this history is and how fragile our understanding is of disease.

The materials referenced in Gurantz’s expansive video works form part of her on-going archive of ephemera exploring disease through multiple intersecting lenses—scientific, cultural, social, and political. Organized into thematic sections (including maps, pustules, the breast, public service announcements, historical amnesia, and charms and magic), each segment combines image and text from a plethora of sources including filmic, scientific, religious, and museological databases, which are connected through massive wall drawings made by the artist. Installed across the gallery in an associative manner, both the archive of images and its method of display encourage a non-linear reading of the subject of disease and its (mis)representation across different historical eras.

The Plague Archives is curated by Ciara Ennis, Director, de Saisset Museum. The exhibition originated at Pitzer College Art Galleries, Pitzer College (January 28 - March 25, 2023) and has been expanded at the de Saisset.

Maya Gurantz’s interdisciplinary research-based practice incorporates dance, video, performance, text, installation, and community-generated projects, which she uses to examine constructions of race, gender, and class in relation to shared myths, public rituals, and private desires. Her work interrogates social imaginaries of American culture and how constructions of gender, race, class and progress operate in our shared myths, public rituals and private desires.

Gurantz’s solo shows include, LA Artcore (as the inaugural recipient of Prospect Art’s PRESENT WORK award), Pitzer College Art Gallery, Catharine Clark Gallery’s Box Blur Commission, collaborative with Ellen Sebastian Chang and Sunhui Chang, Grand Central Art Center, commissioned and curated by John Spiak with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, and MCA Denver. Her work has been included in Group shows at HomeLA, MoCA Utah, LAND (Nomadic Division), Art Center College of Design, Navel LA, Angels Gate Cultural Center, OMCA, High Desert Test Sites, Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, Autonomie Gallery, and Movement Research at Judson Church, among others.

Gurantz’s films have been Official Selections at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Leon Speakers Award, Best Sound Design; selected for 62nd Annual Ann Arbor Film Fest Traveling Tour), Arthouse Film Festival (Eisenstein Award, Best Editing), Athens International Film and Video Festival, the New Renaissance Film Festival in London (Nominee, Best Art Film), the Austin Dance on Film Festival, OnArt in Warsaw, San Francisco Dance Film Festival, and InShadow in Lisbon, among others. 

As well, her writing has been published in Contemporary Art Review LA (CARLA), The LA Review of Books (where her essay, Kompromat, was their most read of 2019), This American Life, Notes on Looking, The Frame at KPCC, ACID-FREE, The Awl, InDance Magazine, Theater Magazine, and an anthology, CRuDE, published by the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Bourges. She also co-translated two novels by Israeli writer David Grossman, Be My Knife and Someone to Run With, for Farrar Straus & Giroux. Gurantz co-hosts the weekly culture and politics podcast, The Sauce.

Social practice has been integral to Gurantz’s work since 2001. Notably, Hole in Space (Oakland Redux), commissioned by The Great Wall of Oakland in collaboration with Ellen Sebastian Chang, was recognized as the “Best Public Art Installation” in the Bay Area. For the Field Experiment Atlanta 2016, Gurantz was commissioned to make new sound and video installations exploring Atlanta’s charged racial history. In 2016, she was also awarded the Media Design Practices Summer Research Residency at Art Center with interaction designer Elizabeth Goodman for Gunworlds, mapping the intractable world of the gun debate.

Gurantz was the recipient of the Simons Humanities Fellowship from the University of Kansas, a Los Angeles Performance Project R+D Grant, the inaugural recipient of the Pieter Performance Grant for Dancemakers, and a recipient of the 2023 Hambidge Artist Center Residency (NEA Distinguished Artist Fellow) and the 2020 Artist Residency at the McColl Center for Art and Innovation. Additionally, she has received funding, awards, and recognition from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the NEA, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Contemporary Collectors, the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Fleishhacker Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Theater Bay Area, the Puffin Foundation, and the Bay Area Critics Circle. Gurantz teaches art at the university level, and has taught graduate critique, undergraduate honors critique, video and performance at UC Santa Barbara, ArtCenter College of Design, and UC Irvine, among others.  She haa a B.A. from Yale and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from UC Irvine.