Scientia Sexualis is an ambitious group survey of contemporary artists whose works take up the fraught relationship between sex, gender, and science. Organized by Jennifer Doyle (Professor of English, University of California, Riverside) and Jeanne Vaccaro (Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies, University of Kansas), the exhibition is realized as part of the ambitious collaboration across arts institutions throughout Southern California known as PST ART: Art & Science Collide led by the Getty.

The exhibition centers research-driven interventions into raced and gendered assumptions that structure scientific disciplines governing our sense of the sexual body. The artists in this exhibition bring attention to the material, conceptual, and psychic forms of the lab and the clinic as aesthetics that operate across scientific and artistic discourses. Together with the catalogue and related programming, Scientia Sexualis aims to examine and reconfigure the relationship between art and science and, in turn, to create an alternative access point to the history of science where sex, gender, and pleasure are concerned.

While several major museum exhibitions have addressed issues of gender, sexuality, and representation, Scientia Sexualis is distinct for the coalitional possibilities it generates between Black, feminist, trans and decolonial approaches to these subjects. The project is intentionally heterogenous, situating Black feminist work that confronts the abuse of Black women’s bodies alongside decolonial interrogations of a settler colonial anthropology, trans reclamation of medical practices, and intersectional feminist interventions in reproductive medicine. As a whole, the exhibition addresses the aftermath of our encounters with scientific discourses and institutions as the featured artists surface the contradictory energies that circulate through the lab and the clinic, the library and the archive, exploring and re-constructing frameworks that tell us not only what sex and gender are, but what a body is and can be.

In his multidisciplinary practice, Carlos Motta (b. 1978) documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities to challenge normative discourses through visibility and representation. As a historian of untold narratives and an archivist of repressed histories, Motta is committed to in-depth research on the struggles of post-colonial subjects and societies. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia. Motta received his MFA from Bard College and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2006. He has received grants from Arts Impact Initiative x Creative Time, 2023; Art Matters, 2008; NYSCA, 2010; the Creative Capital Foundation, 2012; and the Kindle Project, 2012. His work has been the subject of survey exhibitions including Carlos Motta: Formas de libertad at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia in 2017, which traveled to Matucana100, Santiago, Chile in 2018, and Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2015. Motta debuted his first multichannel sound installation at his 2022 solo survey exhibition Your Monsters, Our Idols at the Wexner Center of the Arts, Columbus, OH. His work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; and Museo de Arte de Banco de la República, Bogotá, Columbia; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; among others. In 2019, Motta was appointed tenure-track Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts Department. Carlos Motta: History’s Backrooms, a 20-year career monograph, was published by SKIRA in June 2020. In the fall of 2023, Motta presented Jjagɨyɨ: Air of Life at P·P·O·W in collaboration with Elio Miraña, ELO, Gil Farekatde Maribba, Higinio Bautista, Kiyedekago, Rosita, and Yoí nanegü, marking his third show with the gallery. His work was featured in Marco Scotini’s Disobedience Archive at the sixtieth Venice Biennale. Pleas of Resistance, a mid-career survey exhibition at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain is on view through October 26, 2025.