Mutant Salon is a beauty salon and roving platform for collaborative performance and community-building that strives to foster connections between queer, trans, POC, womyn and mutant communities to celebrate an ethos of transformation and critical togetherness in the act of self care. In addition to offering haircuts, psychic readings, makeup, nails, tattoos, and other treatments, Mutant Salon embraces a continual metamorphosis of itself with each iteration to offer new aesthetic experiences and experimental modes of engagement with an audience. Mutant Salon has taken place in various venues such as Commonwealth & Council, REDCAT, Honor Fraser Gallery, The Broad (LA), and Southern Exposure (San Francisco).
Founded by Young Joon Kwak & Marvin Astorga in 2012, Mutant Salon’s past and current featured artists and collaborators include: Elisa Harkins, Alli Miller, Kelly Akashi, Sarah Gail Armstrong, Jacinto Astiazaran, Lindsay August-Salazar, Dove Ayinde, Barf Queen, Black TED, Ciriza, Corazon Del Sol, Lena Daly, Experimental Half Hour (Eva Aguila and Brock Fansler), Juan Gudiño, Orr Herz, Oree Holban, Jeffzilla, Amanda Joy, Julia Kouneski, laub, Isaac Ledesma, Oscar Ledesma, Long Long (Thinh Nguyen), Fenex Lopez, Maxilla, Evan McCune, Veli Matti-Hoikka, Jennifer Moon, Roxy Morataya, David Muenzer, Anna Luisa Petrisko, Project Rage Queen (Dalton Chase, Alice Cunt, Travis D, Vik Victorious), Elliot Reed, San Cha, Oscar Santos, Matt Savitsky, Barbara T. Smith, Rachelle Sawatsky, Martyna Szczesna, TMO, and Kim Ye, among others.
Cavernous (Publication)
Cavernous (Publication) was released by LACE in 2022, and is both a catalogue of our residency at LACE in 2018, and a living queer archive of Mutant Salon, a collective of queer-trans-femme-POC artists. CAVERNOUS shares the members’ stories navigating arts institutions as marginalized artists alongside tales of gender affirmation and more. In doing so, this project documents the fullness of queer lived experiences through the imaginative fractures in white hetero-patriarchal hegemony, with all its alternative bodies and performances of existence and desire. CAVERNOUS is an ongoing critical deconstruction of how we view our bodies, and reimagines alternative forms of existence and desire through sculpture, installation, performance, wigs and more. Includes writings by Anuradha Vikram, Bradford Nordeen, and Rudy Garcia, a mutant convo with MS members, and more.
Book design by Travis Read-Davidson
Co-edited by Daniela Lieja Quintanar and Juan Silverio
Mutant Salon video documentation
CAVERNOUS
July 12 - August 26, 2018
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)
Festival De Las Muertas
SATURDAY 10/29 & SUNDAY 10/30, 2017
Hammer Museum (LA, CA)
We Make Each Other Beautiful
Saturday June 25, 2016
the Broad (LA, CA)
Exorcises
January 23—February 27, 2016
Commonwealth & Council (LA, CA)
Past Events
2012 - 2016