Kalup linzy biography

Kalup Linzy (born July 23, 1977) is an American video and performance artist who currently lives and works in Tulsa, OK. His performance are characterized.
Kalup Linzy creates satirical narratives inspired by television soap operas, telenovelas and Hollywood melodramas.
Kalup Linzy is an American video and performance artist who currently lives and works in Tulsa, OK. His performance are characterized by their low-tech quality, themes of community, socializing, family, the church, sexuality and homosexuality.

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Welcome to your watchlist

Kalup Linzy was born in 1977 in Clermont, Florida, formerly worked in New York, and currently lives and works in Tampa, Florida. Linzy’s theatrical works challenge ideas of gender while embracing a wide range of pop cultural forms such as soap operas, drag performances, and censored movies and radio programs from the 1930s.

He has developed nearly thirty characters based on stereotypical Hollywood figures and often performs them himself. Whether or not he physically portrays the character, he always voices it, often distorting his voices’ natural sound, a practice that evolved from his childhood lip-syncing hobby.

Linzy works on all aspects of his productions—writing, directing, and filming—and he has combined his DIY aesthetic with high-profile collaborations with figures such as James Franco and Chloe Sevigny.

Links:
Artist on Instagram
Artist on Twitter
Kalup and Franco

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Kalup Linzy in his KK Queens Survey, video still, 2005, digital video, color, sound. Total running time: 7 minutes. All images courtesy of the artist and Taxter and Spengemann, New York.

On a freezing winter day early in 2006 I showed up for a sparsely attended event at the Studio Museum in Harlem showcasing a few performance artists from the museum’sFrequencyexhibition. Between performances, an R&B song piped incongruously throughout the room, presumably signaling intermission. Instead, heads in the audience gradually swiveled around toward a grown man behind us, barefoot and in a black leotard, crooning a Toni Braxton song into a microphone. He crept down a staircase and commanded the stage. It was the first time I saw Kalup Linzy.

Kalup is best known for his bombshell narrative videos (soap operas, really) in which he and a cast of artist-friends act out melancholic melodramas, routinely dressed in drag, often lip-synching to Kalup’s wildly manipulated prerecorded vocal tracks. Most recently, he has just finished a full-length album, recording a music video for

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Kalup Linzy

Biography

In a multidisciplinary practice that includes videos, performances and music, Kalup Linzy creates satirical narratives inspired by television soap operas, telenovelas and Hollywood melodramas. Bringing an irreverent approach to stereotypes of race, gender and sexuality, Linzy performs, most often in drag, in a series of memorable recurring roles. The artist serves as writer, director, cinematographer, editor, and actor—and, in a distinctive strategy, also voices and overdubs the dialogue of multiple characters. At once comic, raunchy and poignant, Linzy's unique narrative videos fuse dramatic intensity with melodramatic irony.

Linzy's low-tech narratives embody a DIY sensibility, an approach that extends to the multiple contexts and formats in which he presents his works: Linzy has released his short videos episodically on YouTube, and they are also widely seen in artworld venues. Linzy also performs live in the guise of his recurring characters, and in 2008 released an album of original R&B songs, SweetBerry Sonnet. In a suite of music videos made