Patty Gone

Patty Gone is a trans poet, multimedia artist, critic, and educator. They make art where the queer imagination and white working-class imagination crash and fall in love. Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Gone draws inspiration from the art forms popular in their hometown. By contorting romance novels or soap operas or action movies into melodramatic and surreal essay-poems, Gone strips the familiar to reveal its zany and irrational core. Incorporating aspects of performance, video art, writing, and installation, Gone both questions and exalts the mainstream by placing kitsch objects, such as Goodwill silks, embroidered platitudes, and tiny Simbas, Scrooge McDuck, and He-Men into dream-like sets and settings. According to critic Nick Salvato, Gone arranges these “simultaneously poetic and preposterous props” into “a renovated Gurlesque for a new decade,” worshipping Lisa Simpson and Danielle Steel as transgender surrogates of suburbia.

Gone is the author of “Love Life” (Mount Analogue, 2019) and “The Impersonators" (Factory Hollow Press, 2017) and director of the ongoing video serial, Painted Dreams (2017, 2018, 2020). Their performance and video art has appeared at the Queens Museum, AS220, Dixon Place, The Poetry Project, and Smack Mellon, and has received grants and support from Mass MoCA, NYU, and Northampton Open Media. In 2021, they founded Gone University, an anti-school that aims to smash each student’s personal taste and replace it with a non-judgmental, open, and interconnected relationship to art.