Stop and Smell a Garden of Roses
John Jarboe, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. The Rose Garden, 2024. Photo credit: Christopher Ash. Courtesy of The Fabric Workshop and Museum.
Performance and visual artist John Jarboe (she/her) explores her gender journey in an intimate, immersive exhibition, The Rose Garden, at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Using surrealist imagery, Jarboe employs different mediums—sculpture, music, installation, and interactive components—to eulogize a previously unknown twin named Rose, whom she had absorbed in their mother’s womb. After coming out as trans to her aunt in Michigan, Jarboe learned about Rose. Her aunt cited the absorption of Rose as an explanation for Jarboe’s trans identity. Internalizing this narrative, Jarboe began to make art about Rose, exploring her in songs and music videos through the performing arts series Works & Process at the Guggenheim.
The Rose Garden takes inspiration from cabinets of curiosities. A cabaret performance at heart, Jarboe allows visitors to uncover objects, music videos, and deeper understandings of themselves. Upon entry, visitors are asked to gather around a table and eat vegan chocolate in the shape of a fetus, effectively incriminating them alongside Jarboe in an act of “gender cannibalism.” Guests are then invited to explore the exhibit, activating installations with a weighted teacup, in which a set of twins are steeping.
John Jarboe, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. The Rose Garden, 2024. Photo credit: Christopher Ash. Courtesy of The Fabric Workshop and Museum.
A path of rose petals both consoles and disorients visitors, exposing them to motifs of dead fish, Alfred Hitchcock, and an enlarged umbilical cord that weaves above their head.
Recreating a moment from childhood, Jarboe ushers us into her mother’s closet. With supersized garments and a trippy room, we are children alongside Jarboe, as she recalls a letter she wrote to her mom where the sentence “I will not disobey mom” is written 104 times. Composed and performed with cellist Daniel de Jesús, Jarboe repeats the refrain in a dramatic music video with nods to Psycho and the relationship between Norman Bates and his mother, Norma.
At the end of the exhibit, guests are “reborn” out of Jarboe’s womb, entering The Green Room—a carpeted hangout area dedicated to the queer and trans community. Here, visitors are encouraged to write “letters to their gender,” the results of which will inspire Jarboe’s future projects.
The interactive rooms serve as a place for people to play, weep, and consider their own gender journeys. In The Rose Garden, Rose lives.
Sophie Steinberg: At the beginning of your exhibit, participants are asked to sit at a table with vegan “fetus chocolate” offerings. A museum educator then talks to us about the show, and we watch Rose's introduction on TV. Why was that important to include?
John Jarboe: I wanted a moment of innocent complicity in the experience. The first thing you do is eat a fetus. Those first moments of introducing someone to a work are super important because you set up the rules and the expectations. In art museums, people are so prone to moving quickly through. Personally, I experience a kind of FOMO, wondering, “Did I see it all? Am I consuming the art properly?” The goal of having a fetus as a little treat at the beginning was to set the tone, “OK, this is going to be a little weird. It will be silly and funny, and it involves eating a fetus?” Then you settle down and get some sugar, and you're like, “I'm going to watch this intro video. I guess this will be an experience where I stay here a little bit.” The whole installation prompts you to constantly think back and realize, “Oh, that's what that was.” In your own gender journey, you're often reaching back and placing a puzzle piece in its proper location.
John Jarboe, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. The Rose Garden, 2024. Photo credit: Christopher Ash. Courtesy of The Fabric Workshop and Museum.
SS: The exhibit is very interactive, leaning into the idea of “an escape room.” What did you want people to take away from their unique interactions with the space?
JJ: I was trying to find ways [to make sure] the museum experience is not passive and you feel empowered. I was asking myself, “What are the actions of a gender journey?” Those, to me, feel like searching, digging, unearthing, and going where you shouldn't go. At the entrance to the exhibition, it says, “Beware of Midwestern Denial: Do Not Enter.” I love the idea of being asked to enter a space that is off-limits. Art museums are places [where] there is the tyranny of politeness. I'm always trying to subvert that—touch the art, mix it up. It's wild what people do in the gallery.
SS: In the exhibit, you said the gallery took you “33 years to grow.” I know parts of the show have been explored in different formats, did you ever think it would be in a physical art installation?
JJ: That was my dream from the beginning. I was working with Duke Dang at Works & Process, and they commissioned different films during the pandemic. My concept for the exhibition was that they would present the films in an art installation. I was thinking about the Mütter Museum, cabinet of curiosities, queer villainy, and Wunderkammers (a German word meaning room of wonder). I thought, “It's a ‘Womb-der kammer.” I've been excited to discover [the exhibit] starts very linearly—you're “on the rails’”as they would say in video game terminology—and then you go into an open-world format.
John Jarboe, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. The Rose Garden, 2024. Photo credit: Christopher Ash. Courtesy of The Fabric Workshop and Museum.
SS: One of my favorite parts of the exhibit is the installation and music video titled “I Will Not Disobey Mom,” inspired by a real letter you wrote to your mother. What was it like to create the music video and song?
JJ: I wrote the text when I was eight, and then I gave it to Daniel de Jesus, who is an incredible cellist, singer, composer, and painter—just stunning. I told Daniel, “I want to sing ‘I will not disobey mom’ as many times as I wrote it in this letter, which was 104 times.” I wanted it to be a bit emo. Daniel wrote the song and then, in dreaming about the video, I was thinking about Hitchcock. I was obsessed with Psycho and this idea that queer folks, because of the way that we're portrayed in the media, often cast ourselves as villains in our own life. [I began] exploring the connections with Norman Bates and doing all these “self-punishment” rituals that are kind of horrifying and were true to my experience as a recovering Catholic, trans human from Michigan. I washed my mouth out with soap. I hit myself in that video. There was something ecstatic about recreating those moments with ownership, as a queer person, for your rituals of shame to become rituals of liberation.
John Jarboe. Fishy, 2022. Photo by Christopher Ash. Courtesy of The Fabric Workshop and Museum.
SS: In the exhibit, there are rose petals leading visitors around through the immersive performance space. Towards the end, we find out they are the same material as the scales of a giant fish corpse. What was the inspiration behind the fish?
JJ: When I went to The Fabric Workshop and Museum, I had all of the videos except the final one, so the question was how to structure the journey through the film. I wanted to find an environment that, when the video was nested in it, would encourage you to listen and would elucidate the themes of the video. There was talk of an egg, but I was thinking about the metaphor of “a fish inside a fish” and how that relates to transness and cannibalism and me eating Rose. When you’re gutting a fish, sometimes you can find another fish inside a bigger fish.
SS: Even though you do not accompany visitors to the exhibit, I felt as though you were walking through with me. Why is intimacy in art-making important to you?
JJ: I've always been drawn to performance and art-making as a way to have a conversation. I love being considered as an audience member. I don't create or go to live performances to make something that is in a groove, that could just happen anytime. That's why I like cabaret so much—it's so insistent on its liveness. The real gift of the exhibition for me is that wall at the end, with the letters that people have written to their gender. That tells me that the exhibition is doing what I wanted to do, and that people are taking the time to process. To achieve that, one needs to make space and make people feel special and taken care of. Messapotamia Lefae, who is often the person at the front [of The Green Room] who welcomes you, doula-ed me into my gender. She got hired at The Fabric Workshop for the exhibition, and it means a lot that she's there to make a joke or to flirt. That's where the magic happens.
SS: What’s the most rewarding part of having a space like The Green Room as the final room in the exhibition? I know there have been author talks, resources for queer folks, and space to hang out or do a clothing swap.
JJ: Definitely the letters. I need to figure out how to do it, but I would love to publish a book of all those letters. When Geena Rocero came, a bunch of young trans folks from the Community College of Philadelphia came. The room was just filled with young trans folks talking to Geena and seeing this rad artist, activist, writer, and content creator. I was like, “This is beautiful. This has become a space where people who need each other are meeting.” That space is also aiming to shift the culture of museum-going and even the culture in The Fabric Workshop, which is a weird museum. I wish more people did their homework there. I wish more people treated it like a coffee shop. It's a little hard to do that on the second floor, but [the room] has been really rewarding.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
The Rose Garden was on view at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, from May 11th to September 29th, 2024. The exhibit was supported by a grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
