Tears for Tears

How minoritarian artists grapple with both personal and collective grief

Tears for Tears documents moments of tension, negotiation, transformation, and incommensurability between singular loss and mass death through the work of contemporary minoritarian artists. These artists interrogate the cultural, social, and political enmeshment of death by questioning the interior and exterior conditions of loss Charting communal, singular, ongoing, and impending loss due to state-sanctioned violence, colonial racial capitalism, natural disaster, and social and personal circumstances, Sandra Ruiz underscores the affective entanglements across death that reshape the topography of grief into portals of possibility.

Drawing from original interviews, familial artifacts, images, and personal archival notes of artists—much of which have never been written about before—the project centers the minoritarian artist as living with and against death in everyday life and art practice. In doing so, the manuscript stages an archival and ideological intervention into the life of grief for minoritarian subjects and artists.
Moving across performance and video art, sculpture, dance, music, theatre, and poetry, Ruiz highlights the relationship between everyday life and staged events as a critical lens to rethink structures of colonial and imperial spatial temporalities of grief. Offering invaluable insights into the production of these works and performances, Ruiz reveals how these artists move across social, corporeal, and psychic constructions of sorrow in their art practices—often working from parental loss into the domain of communal death—and see grieving, however painful, as an act of empowerment, transformation, growth, and communal building.

Sandra Ruiz is Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ruiz is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance and Left Turns in Brown Study. Aesthetics. Ruiz is also the producer of La Estación Gallery and the Minor Aesthetics Lab.

Sandra Ruiz is Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ruiz is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance, Left Turns in Brown Study, and the coeditor of the book series Minoritarian
Aesthetics. Ruiz is also the producer of La Estación Gallery and the Minor Aesthetics Lab.

An invaluable contribution to black, brown, feminist and queer scholarship on loss. Brilliant and beautifully written, Tears for Tears reframes or rather unframes minoritarian grief, refusing to contain it within the narratives of colonial racial capitalism. Sandra Ruiz turns instead to performances of grief by minoritarian artists-theorists in which holes torn by loss become active portals. In the expansive forms of communion these performances invite, across the presumed divide between life and death, and the awareness of ‘ensemblic entanglement’ their textures and rhythms awaken, Ruiz finds ways of working through loss that are also ways of working toward a collective construction of a new social order. The project, she teaches us, is not to seek closure but to hold the portals open.

A beautifully lyric sojourn of release to better worlds, pleasures, and becomings relevant to scholars of Performance Studies, Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, Latinx Studies, Sociology and Art History. The tender respect Tears for Tears extends towards each featured artist, and their creative works invite considerations of grief that only collectivist performances entangled with so much love can reveal. I marvel at Sandra Ruiz’s power to write with/in the unmapped space-time of counter-cultural performance to trace unexpected energies and impermanent presences in every memory, ritual and tear.