Art By Tarts Showcases Works By Queer and POC Sex Workers

According to Red, founder of sex worker-run advocacy group Stroll, there are basically only two ways most people characterize strippers and other sex workers.

"You're either a rich white woman and you're empowered and you're doing it for fun because you're sexually adventurous, or you're, like, a trafficked person," she says.

"Complicated" is the most succinct way Red (both her stage and activist name) describes her own experience with stripping and the sex industry. That also might be the most succinct description of Stroll's annual exhibit of all-sex-worker-created art, Art By Tarts. The media for the show's third year is as diverse as art shows get, including everything from opera to paintings to video installations to sculpture. The majority of the artists are people of color or queer.

Red sits around a table at Pied Cow Coffeehouse with two of Stroll's other organizers, Becky Barryte, who works for a women's crisis line and specializes in sex worker support, and Kaitalina Salas, an artist and activist who has worked as both a stripper and in porn.

"I very quickly learned that Portland doesn't have a lot of energy for the narrative of non-white sex workers," says Salas, who is Latina and queer. "If we're talking about non-white sex workers who are trans or nonbinary or queer, we're moving further away from what people actually like to talk about when they talk about rights."

According to Barryte, Salas and Red, conversation about the industry often confuse consensual sex work with trafficking. What's more, it usually involves a debate over whether or not sex work is exploitative, without establishing the kind of boundaries that would reduce exploitation. "The problem isn't that men come into these spaces," says Salas. "The problem is that they don't understand that it's just a job, and that regardless if you're paying me money to do this or do that, I still deserve your respect."

"One thing we know about abusive people in general is that they target people who are vulnerable, accessible and who lack credibility," adds Barryte. "Sex workers definitely fit into that because of the way we've constructed our society around them."

Some works in this year's show blatantly critique problems within the sex industry, like Mikki Mischief's would-be cutesy cartoons that decry legal policies that systematically incriminate sex workers. But many of the works relay personal experiences instead of a clear message. There will be a preview of Red's graphic novel about her decade-plus career as a stripper. Seattle-based artist Clara will contribute miniature re-creations of strip clubs where she's worked. Some of the works aren't about sex work at all—like a performance of an aria from the opera Lucia di Lammermoor.

Still, the fact that the show actively avoids portraying a specific image of sex work is, its own way, a message. "It functions in a way that humanizes dancers, humanizes sex workers, [though] I don't know why that's still something that needs to be done," Salas says about the show. And, "It allows every who's involved in the show to express their experience in the most authentic way without any superimposed ideas about what it's supposed to be."

On the subject of the one type of sex worker people do seem comfortable talking about—the "sexually adventurous," conventionally attractive and white woman, Salas adds, "My problem is not with that individual. My problem is that when you give her rights, you're giving the rights to the top of the pyramid and it's not going to come down to everyone else. We have to start with the people who are the most marginalized and build up from there."

GO: Art By Tarts is at PCC's Cascade Campus, 705 N Killingsworth St., strollpdx.org. 6-9 pm Thursday, June 15. Free.