By Jake Skeets

What does it mean to build a museum? For video maker and interdisciplinary artist Chris E. Vargas, building a museum means critiquing the institution itself, where the museum as an artifact interrogates the power of its presence, questions its authority, and reveals its limitations. As the founder and director of the Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art (MOTHA), a conceptual museum “forever under construction,” Vargas reshapes how we think about the role of institutions in preserving, categorizing, and exhibiting marginalized histories. Vargas describes it as a conceptual art project; the museum itself has no physical structure, which allows him the ability to play with form and function. In his words, MOTHA is an ongoing experiment, an act of “expropriating power” that masquerades as a museum to critique museums. What happens when you name something a museum? Who decides what is worthy of preservation? What histories are collected, and which are ignored? And what of the “archive?”
“The project investigates various aspects of people’s relationships to museums, specifically marginalized people who maybe have a difficult relationship with museums as pillars of white, cis, colonial, Western culture,” says Vargas. “The fluid nature of its form is also important to me. Because I don’t have a space, it gets to be very flexible and call into question the very power of museums and power of naming.”

One of MOTHA’s featured projects is the book Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects. Part archive, part speculative, part historiography, part art form, Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects peers through time and ancestry to narrate the collective power and story within transgender communities by gathering objects, artwork, and artifacts from various artists, writers, poets, activists, and scholars. Spanning four centuries, the book defies empirical classification and instead relies on the living memories and documents of trans communities throughout an often-erased or underrepresented history. Like gender, art itself is often contained within and even felt through narrow categorization that reflects a larger, dominant Western and colonial society. Resistance requires fluidity.

The threading within Vargas’s work is motion and movement within, between, among, and beyond identity. Vargas is originally from California, where DIY and punk attitudes sparked numerous movements within art and culture. His work spans film, video, performance, and installation, always maintaining a critical edge toward dominant narratives of gender, history, and cultural memory. His practice began in DIY experimental filmmaking, making collaborative, small-scale projects focused on queer and trans politics, radical critique, and the politics of visibility. Now based in Washington, Vargas explains that conversations and community inform themes in his work. “My work is always a contribution to a larger conversation with the communities of which I am a part,” says Vargas.

Over time these conversations with various communities evolved his work into an exploration of archives and the gaps within them—those spaces where trans, queer, and racialized histories are absent or distorted. His interventions are often speculative, filling in those absences with playful yet deeply critical reconstructions of what could have been. They are a practice of freedom, language borrowed from a film Vargas made with Eric A. Stanley called Criminal Queers (2015). The film imagines “a world without walls” while taking on the prison-industrial complex. At the film’s center is a quote from Flo Kennedy: “All oppressed people have a right to violence.” This urgency to demystify power takes shape in the DIY nature of Vargas’s work.

“If you have a group of people who are enthusiastic and committed, you can make something happen out of nothing. There is a real power in community, and this will sound cheesy, but it’s real to say that communities can dream up stuff together and make it tangible,” says Vargas. Video and film were ways Vargas created community. Through often scrappy and low-tech means, Vargas’s early work highlights the accessibility of video and film as art forms. Even when it isn’t, Vargas insists on reclamation and persistence. “You don’t have to ask for permission.”

This sentiment is one shared by one of Vargas’s inspirations: John Waters. Obsessed with the obscene, Waters, also known as “The Pope of Trash,” grew up in Baltimore and rose to fame as a filmmaker, writer, artist, and fashion icon. There are rivers of Waters’s work within Vargas’s films. The focus on queerness, radical video-making, and humor illuminates Vargas’s artwork in layered ways. Teasing through complexities has been a consistent task for Vargas.

Now, Vargas finds himself at a threshold moment in his career. After years of expanding and sustaining MOTHA, he is considering whether to continue its trajectory or move in an entirely new direction. He describes the moment as both liberating and uncertain, an opportunity to return to earlier modes of work while questioning what comes next. “I stopped making film because I started to not be able to understand it outside making content for digital platforms, and I became really disinterested,” says Vargas. “I want to remember what that early relationship to film and video was like.”

Vargas was one of two artists selected for the 2025 Artist-in-Residence program at Los Luceros Historic Site. “Vargas is a natural fit in many ways,” says Kiersten Fellrath, a Public Art Program coordinator for New Mexico Arts. “The Los Luceros Historic Site is one of the largest historic sites in New Mexico, and Vargas brings with him a new research base and context.” It is true that the Los Luceros Historic Site is one of the “most scenic and historically significant properties” in New Mexico, according to its website. It sits on land that is layered with many complex voices, peoples, and histories: histories of colonization, gendered power dynamics, and artistic appropriation.

What we know of the desert is its ability to help sharpen perspective because the light echoes differently in the high desert. Vargas spent some time visiting The Land of Enchantment as a child and noticed, even then, the way the New Mexico landscape defies what being a desert is. In a way, then, New Mexico will be a kind of homecoming for Vargas—not to a literal home, but to an earlier love of film, video, and moving image as mediums. Supporting art is something like matchmaking and helping artists find a mirror. A New Mexico sunset that explodes every evening is as big a mirror as one can offer. 

Vargas’s project at Los Luceros will explore the relationship between Mary Wheelwright, a white woman at the center of New Mexico’s early twentieth-century art and anthropology circles, and Hastiin Klah, a Diné weaver and medicine person whose contributions were foundational to the museum that bears Wheelwright’s name. For Vargas, this project will be an attempt to understand how marginalized people navigate their relationships with institutions that simultaneously document and exploit them. 

“Their identities are interesting to me: Wheelwright being a white woman of this movement called The New Woman movement, which saw, for the first time in colonial American history, more independence and autonomy for a certain class of woman and how her moving out West follows this trajectory of expansion that is at odds with feminist liberation,” explains Vargas. The argument here is that white feminism is often linked with colonialism, which does not align with any calls for justice or liberation. Wheelwright, as a pillar of history within this space, represents a narrow vision of what counts as feminist liberation. Enter the layers of Indigenous history in the area and Wheelwright’s engagements with Hastiin Klah, a figure often used to posit a pre-contact gender fluidity among Indigenous communities. Vargas is asking the question: How do we understand figures like Klah through contemporary frameworks such as a Two-Spirit identity when those terms did not exist at the time? There is a struggle with applying contemporary lenses to historical figures. Where speculative work fails, attention to the entrenched nature of power and the way it permeates all communities can be a way to reconcile these two ends and re-envision pasts and futures.

“Hastiin Klah’s gender is interesting to me, and I’m interested in how Wheelwright and Klah’s identities come together and the kinds of inherent power dynamics that exist within their relationship. I guess I’m interested in the complexities of a racialized power dynamic and how those kinds of relationships informed history. How history is collected and preserved and identified as legitimate,” says Vargas.

For Fellrath, Vargas’s care and intentionality around complexity sets him up as an artist capable not only of exploring but also of witnessing a relationship between two important figures within New Mexico art history. New Mexico is home to twenty-three federally recognized Pueblos and tribes and to others that remain state-recognized or unrecognized altogether, each with its own cultural and linguistic history that predates and counters Western gender norms. “Trans and queer identities are not new identities. They have always existed and have carried on through time,” says Fellrath. This understanding warps normal modes of historic preservation. Centering diverse cultural histories is foundational to the Los Luceros Historic Site. Purchased in 2008 by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, which oversees the New Mexico Arts Commission, Los Luceros Historic Site maintains the important work of artmaking in the context of land, people, and time. Vargas’s project exploring Wheelwright and Klah’s relationship through a trans lens offers the Los Luceros Historic Site a necessary intervention. While New Mexico Arts focuses on New Mexico artists, it also opens the residency to artists who propose projects that could contribute significantly to the New Mexico art scene. “It’s important to cross-pollinate and offer space for new perspectives,” says Fellrath.

The high desert of Northern New Mexico introduces yet another layer of complexity. The region has long drawn artists and outsiders who romanticize its landscape, from Georgia O’Keeffe to the tourism industry that markets the state as a place of cultural harmony. Vargas approaches this space with both curiosity and caution, keenly aware of the ways its histories have been flattened and commodified. He is interested in the ways New Mexico tells stories about itself, the narratives that are promoted, and the ones that remain obscured.

In this lens, New Mexico becomes a museum. For Vargas, then, this project is an extension of his ongoing interest in the politics of archives. How do institutions legitimize certain histories while erasing or distorting others? He says, “Understanding the politics of archives is knowing how cultural biases are inherent to collections and how there will always be gaps in what’s recorded and what’s deemed legitimate. Artists are in a really unique position to use those gaps creatively and generate something for those spaces. So, a lot of what I’ve done is speculative in that way, using these lesser-known histories and speculating what would be possible.”

Using speculative art as a framework is Vargas’s way of reconciling complex narratives. Speculative work is highly futurist and shines brightly in queer and marginalized spaces where futurity is under constant threat. This truth is paramount in queer history. Under the current administration, it’s becoming all the more urgent to find the gaps in the archives and speculate about what is possible in those silences. Artists like Vargas who are playing with time are opening up possibilities for the future. So, Vargas maintains a commitment to resisting linearity. His work challenges the assumption that history moves in a straight line, that progress follows a neat trajectory. Instead, he leans into speculation as a means of artmaking. The act of undoing dominant narratives is creative by nature. As Vargas reconnects with film and video, he returns not to the past, but to a space of artistic possibility—one that is shaped by history but not bound by it. It is an act of futuring, which has become a way marginalized communities have used speculative and creative expression to inspire strategies for continued survival.

Another possibility for Vargas’s project at Los Luceros is John Waters in the desert. He might also work on an intense interrogation of museums, archives, land, and identity. Vargas’s practice thrives in uncertainty. Whether through MOTHA, his explorations of archival gaps, or his proposed speculative film project at the Los Luceros Historic Site, his work will continue to challenge, complicate, and expand our understanding of what history—and the future—can be.

As Vargas moves into this next phase of his career, his work remains a conversation with history, identity, and the institutions that attempt to define them. His speculative and critical approach reminds us that archives are never neutral, that history is always contested, and that art can be a powerful tool for disruption and reimagination. Whatever path he takes next, Vargas’s practice ensures that the act of questioning remains central, opening space for new narratives, new futures, and the radical potential of an art that refuses to be contained.

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Jake Skeets is a poet and writer and was named Navajo Nation Poet Laureate in 2025. He is the author of the award-winning collection Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers.