Opinion
Rachel Rampleman has been documenting drag performers for 6 years. With over a thousand hours of footage of interviews and performances, she has compiled the largest archive of American drag in the world. At SoMad, a queer and femme-led contemporary art space in Manhattan, Rampleman unveils their latest iteration of Life Is Drag. In a dark room, glowing monitors with monumental portraits of drag artists shimmer, shout, and whisper. Ultra high definition acts of defiance and glamour brighten the walls in this installation, running through December 18, 2025.
Life Is Drag’s main project encompasses more than 370 performances and over 200 artists. Each subject, whether a burlesque performer, drag king, or cultural shapeshifter, is filmed in full, attempting to answer a deceptively simple question: What does drag mean to you? The chorus of bizarre and squishy performances has made the digital tangible. Responding to Instagram censorship and queer bullying, this archive is built on community rather than clicks.
In a 4-story Flatiron building with no heat or air conditioning, SoMad invited Rampleman for a residency. She brought in 14 drag performers, hosting both freezing and sweaty video and photo shoots from February to June. Rampleman’s current exhibition displays the fruits of this labor, large 75-inch monitors of gyrating, posing, and lip-synching. Perhaps most interesting is Rampleman’s semi-documentary piece projected on the back wall, asking individual performers what drag means to them and the state of America today.
Self-referential riffs and art history smackdowns give Rampleman’s new show an edge. In one performance, Esther, The Bipedal Entity! critiques Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, while arguing with themselves that “art museums are where culture goes to die… museums do not produce culture, they absorb and annihilate it, they are hyperreal stockpiles of capital.”
This is both a thesis and a threat.
Another video features Amygdala channeling Laurie Anderson beneath a towering projection of “OUR LEADERS HAVE FAILED”. The performance collapses avant-garde nostalgia into present-day politics. Much more stylized is Paris Alexander wearing a Beetlejuice inspired puffy gown striped in black and white, their face painted in matching bands. Paris delivers “Out, damn spot” from Macbeth before sliding straight into the Eurythmics’ “I Could Give You (a Mirror).”
The results here are drag as critique, archive, séance, and creative celebration.
In a culture where social media platforms throttle visibility through opaque algorithms (see Clarity Haynes’ article on their own censorship battles), Life Is Drag functions as a sanctuary city. Rampleman’s work resists aesthetic flattening, celebrating the hyper-polished 14 performers. Social media’s algorithm, after all, does not care for their nuance. It rewards conformity while punishing complexity. We don’t have to look far into our history to see similar cultural whitewashing. I’m reminded of the burning of queer archives during the early AIDS crisis: erased evidence of lives lived outside prescribed norms. With performers like Sweaty Eddie and Amygdala, Rampleman’s documentation is so outside the norm, it is in outer space.
Rampleman’s approach to drag is Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork marrying documentary, music, performance, and aesthetics. She places herself in a lineage of artists like Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin. Yet in the dark cave of this SoMad show, Rampleman’s preservation of drag is intimate, celebratory, and political. When queer performance is dismissed as ephemeral, Life Is Drag says permanence is king and history can be reclaimed on our own terms.
About the writer: Jac Lahav is an artist and arts writer based in Connecticut whose practice spans portraiture, art history, and installation. With 9 solo museum exhibitions, their work has appeared at institutions including the Jewish Museum New York NY and Longview MFA TX and supported by National Endowments of the Arts and the Rauschenberg Foundation. @jaclahav | jaclahav.com
Rachel Rampleman’s “Life Is Drag”: An Epic Queer Archive at SoMad
34 E 23rd St 4th floor, New York, NY 10010
Sept 18 – Dec 18