Swishing It Up for OUTsider Fest 2024

Winter winds blow, but there’s no chill whatsoever when it comes to this year’s OUTsider Fest, celebrating 10 years of outsider art with the theme “The Swish Up.” Austin’s premier transmedia event blows through the Vortex from Feb. 15-18 carrying with it a whole host of fantastic artists, performances, and opportunities to really bake your noodle.

Founder of OUTsider and returning artistic director for this year’s festivities, Curran Nault, began the event as an extension of their academic work, most notably their book Queercore: Queer Punk Media Subculture. “One of the geneses of OUTsider was trying to continue the kind of queer punk spaces that existed in the Nineties, including in Austin,” Nault says. However, those physical spaces have rapidly become thin on the ground in recent years. “We’ve obviously been in the Vortex for the past several years,” Nault says after listing fallen former OUTsider venues Salvage Vanguard Theater and the Off Center. “It’s now one of the only DIY performance spaces still left in Austin.”

Yet change is core to OUTsider and to what Nault wants for their creation. “For me, as a founder, the past 10 years have been [about] trying to step back more and more,” they say, “and let new voices, new people take the reins and bring new ideas.” Thanks to a recent city of Austin grant allowing for paid hires, Nault is joined by new co-Artistic Director Laura Gutiérrez, currently at UT-Austin as a professor of Latinx studies and the author of MLA book award-winner Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage. She’s been involved with OUTsider through its 10 years, including the fest’s initial 2014 manifestation where she served as a moderator for a discussion on performance and gender. “Besides having had the opportunity to be embedded in the festival's program,” Gutiérrez recalls, “I was blown away by the festival's programming as I was getting to witness major and iconic queer performers in an intimate setting.” Being able to view queer Latinx artists who she’d written about as part of OUTsider’s programming served as an eye-opener in how her work could be expanded beyond traditional classroom or published means.

With both Nault and Gutiérrez being UT-Austin professors, they share an interesting perspective on recent difficulties thrown at academia by Texas’ state government. Nault acknowledges how legislation like DEI office-destroyer Senate Bill 17, which recently went into effect on UT’s campus, reflect an anti-education bent in Texas’ politics. However, in such a scary moment, they do see a faint silver lining in how “in a certain way [it] makes a space like OUTsider are all the more important to hold on to in Austin.” Gutiérrez finds that the current political climate has affected queer artists but holds that this effect doesn’t spell “a decline of queer cultural work.” Instead, “the climate has probably fueled more and perhaps even more interesting work,” she observes. “This, however, is something we will not be able to see until some time has passed.”

This year’s fest theme, “The Swish Up,” is multilayered in meaning, Nault and Gutiérrez explain. One meaning plays on the queer lineage of swishy-ness: the feminine, the silly, the camp of queerness. The theme invites us to examine “the ways in which the kind of words and ideas that have been associated with our community in the past, including through things that have a certain shame attached to them like that idea of effeminate or swishyness, [have been] used as a kind of insult,” Nault says. “But also the ways in which we reclaim that and don't lose sight of those histories.”

The other reading of this year’s theme references the switch up brought on by OUTsider’s 10 year milestone. As important as honoring our queer genealogies is, Gutiérrez says, “we also want to think about the future and finding ways to move forward through the joy, pains, struggles, and whatever comes into the horizon.”

“That's a lot and maybe too hopeful,” she adds, “but you've caught me during a day when I'm feeling optimistic.”

OUTsider Fest 2024: The Swish Up

General fest badges are $109, and student/youth badges are $49. Check out the Chronicle’s exclusive first look at OUTsider Fest’s official programing and schedule. Many of these times are subject to change, so make sure you visit outsiderfest.org for all the latest updates. The full artist schedule will be released on Thu., Jan. 18.

All events will be at the Vortex (2307 Manor Rd.) unless otherwise noted

Thursday, February 15

7pm | Entre Despierto Y Dormido; Rogelio Lopez, Kevin Gaytan, Matthew Han

9pm | Perpetual Oyster & Clara Jubilee

Friday, February 16

11am | Conference on the Couch @ OUThouse

7pm | An Evening with Complicity Huffman; Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

9pm | Legacy Award: Austin Ancestral Spacemakers! Honoring Priscilla Hale, Sandra Martinez, Chale Nafus and Susan Post, featuring performances by Lavender Thug, Gothess Jasmine, Bobby Pudrido, Catalina La O (khattieQ), Nicotine, Gretchen Phillips, Kay Turner and more @ Cheer Up Charlies

Saturday, February 17

11am| Conference on the Couch @ OUThouse

3pm | Trouble; Ajani Brannum

5pm | We Are (nothing) Everything; Anya Cloud, Makisig Akin, Stevie Gunter

7pm| The Lone Flamingo; Aquarius Funkk

8:30pm| No Exit!: Early Career Retrospective; Xandra Ibarra

Sunday, February 18

2:30pm | Mirror Voxx; Sofia Silueta, Isabella Vik

4pm | Laman Haywans; Artist-in-Residence: Mirrored Fatality; mango gwen, samar saif

6pm | Bionic Dicks and Hyper Real Niggas: A Post Human and Ancient Sci-fi Aching; M. Lamar

8pm | Mexican Jihad