Tears for Tears: Aesthetics in Grief Minor (Minoritarian Aesthetics)

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.