Kalup Linzy

Kalup Linzy (born July 23, 1977, in Clermont, Florida) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores gender, sexuality, class, family, religion, and the social textures of Black life in the rural American South. Working across video, performance, music, drawing, photography, and painting, Linzy examines identity, desire, and cultural stereotype through satire, melodrama, drag performance, and a deliberately lo-fi aesthetic shaped by soap operas, television, and popular culture.  Linzy received both a BFA and an MFA from the University of South Florida and also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work often engages performance, language, community, religion, and media culture, using recurring characters, scripted narrative, singing, costume, and role-play to consider how race, gender performance, queerness, and aspiration are shaped through social expectation and entertainment forms. Across his videos and performances, he frequently appears in drag and inhabits multiple roles, blurring the boundaries between critique, comedy, vulnerability, and fantasy.  His work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and other major institutions, and he has received honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Kalup Linzy lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma.