This interview originally appeared in Issue 15, published October 25, 2025. You can read this piece and more by purchasing a copy of or subscription to the magazine here.
Tourmaline’s exhibition this fall marks something of a homecoming—she grew up in Roxbury and traces her earliest formation as an artist to her childhood in Boston. Her work since leaving Boston has spanned organizing, making art and films, and writing, but one through line has been the legacy of Marsha P. Johnson. Tourmaline’s recently published biography of Johnson, titled simply Marsha, underscores her multifaceted, polymathic life: Stonewall rebel, STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) organizer, Times Square performer, AIDS care worker. Tourmaline likens Johnson’s presence to a ceaselessly turning crystal, infinitely variegated in its refraction and dispersion of light.
Her film Pollinator (2022), the centerpiece of the Carpenter Center exhibition, enacts this dispersion by interweaving footage of Marsha’s memorial with other, more recent images. It was previously shown at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, MUDAM Luxembourg, and Art Basel, among other venues. At Harvard, the film is accompanied by a series of photographic self-portraits captured in locations designed by Paul R. Williams (1894–1980), the trailblazing Black architect known for designing the homes of Hollywood celebrities. Across these images, Tourmaline luxuriates in the dappled light of his landscapes. Each is named after a different model of luxury vehicle: Silver Wraith, Phantom VIII, Sweptail.
I spoke to Tourmaline in early August about the exhibition, her path from organizer to artist, and the racialized history of rest. She joined me via Zoom from Miami, where she had recently moved—as she stated in another interview—“for love.”
The following conversation has been edited and condensed.
ZACH NGIN: Can you say a bit about your connection to the Boston area and what it was like to grow up here?
TOURMALINE: I was born at Brigham and Women’s in Boston. And I grew up in Roxbury and went to Head Start on Huntington Avenue. While I was in Head Start, my mom was taking classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and MassArt, in a certificate program. She was also a camp art teacher during the summer months and taught art at Morville House, a community space for elders in Boston. So I was really encouraged to cultivate my joy and my emotional expression through art.
Looking back, my siblings and I were doing all these art projects that were probably aligned with what our mother was learning at the time. It was a lot of papier-mâché, a lot of printmaking. I enrolled in photography when I was ten. I was really committed to black-and-white photography, and I was doing it at the Boys and Girls Club in Charlestown and in Bunker Hill. It was something that felt affirming—I was able to show how I saw the world. That felt really powerful because Boston at the time was a deeply segregated city and there was a lot of anti-Black racism. I was also starting to perform as part of this community theater that was led by my gay, not-quite-uncle, mentor-friend person, David Farwell. It was run out of Saint Cecilia Church in the Back Bay. So much of who I am as an artist came from those places.
ZN: You spent many years as an organizer with trans and abolitionist organizations in New York, and I believe you started to focus on art around 2015. What was on your mind at the time?
TOURMALINE: I went to Columbia University with my art portfolio, and I planned on doing art there, but it was just not a matching vibration for so many reasons. I became part of this group called SPEaK, which formed out of the hunger strikes at Columbia and students who were organizing around ethnic studies and gentrification. Then I was on staff at Critical Resistance and Queers for Economic Justice.
At Queers for Economic Justice, I was part of this group called the Welfare Warriors, and we made a documentary [Taking Freedom Home] from 2007 to 2010. It was a collectively made film: Kagendo Murungi was the director, but we were all creating it together. After that, I joined the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, where I was working around Medicaid and the exclusions around gender-affirming care that New York State had. When we successfully won our campaign to repeal those exclusions in October 2014, I was like, “Oh my God, I am so burnt out.”
I had just come off of three different campaigns—stopping a jail, Medicaid, and welfare—and I was like, “I actually need to catch up with myself because I’ve been going so hard in a way that hasn’t been cultivating my relationship with art or creativity in the ways that I want.” And so, yeah, it was 2014 that I pivoted. I joined the Queer|Art|Mentorship program with my friend Sasha Wortzel to work on Happy Birthday, Marsha! It took many years. We started shooting in 2015, but we were working on it for a few years before that, and the film didn’t come out until 2018. It was a durational performance in believing in yourself despite the material conditions not necessarily reflecting Oh, you’re an artist.
ZN: Do you think of activism and art as different chapters of your life, or do you see them as blending together?
TOURMALINE: I think of what I do now as a culmination of all the different eras in my life. When I was first organizing, I was really annoyed by the art world. I thought, “What do they have to say about our lives?” Looking back, I have a lot of compassion for why I felt that way, but I didn’t necessarily have the full picture I do now, which is that all of these things are in conversation with each other. Using art to change my interiority and transform and grow has had a huge impact on how I think about changing the conditions in the world that are detrimental to so many of us.
ZN: In 2017, you edited an anthology with Eric Stanley and Johanna Burton called Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. That was closer to the moment of visibility known as the “trans tipping point,” but in that book, there was a lot of much-needed skepticism about what “positive representation” does for most trans people. In the United States, we’re now in a moment of full-fledged backlash and open persecution of trans life, and I’m curious about how you look back on that earlier intervention.
TOURMALINE: So much of that came out of the organizing that Eric and I and other contributors in the book were involved in, which was about centering the basic needs of our communities: access to housing, healthcare, welfare, jobs, freedom from state violence. When we center those issues, we are not leaving behind people who are in the margins of the movement or of society. Looking back, I think I’m even more deeply committed to that way of seeing the world. It’s important to think expansively about this moment and make sure that the issues that are most impacting our lives, such as freedom from state violence and incarceration and deportation, are not forgotten about.
ZN: Your upcoming exhibition at the Carpenter Center, which opens in October, is largely framed around the idea of the pollinator, which is the title of one of your films. What does this mean to you?
TOURMALINE: To me, the idea of pollination is about dispersing something, whether it’s an idea or a feeling. In astrology, those would be the mutable signs—Gemini, Virgo, Pisces, Sagittarius; they’re all here to disperse a particular kind of quality. Marsha was a Virgo. Her birthday was August 24, and the film is really in conversation with her as a pollinator constantly dispersing something. Her embodied life wasn’t the end of her capital-L life. She has continued and continues to disperse Marsha to this day.
ZN: Flowers are a big part of this, I understand.
TOURMALINE: Exactly. We filmed it in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Claire Sullivan, who’s a fashion designer, made my looks out of these long synthetic flowers, and they’re so lush and alive.
ZN: The film also includes images of Marsha’s funeral, images of your dad, images from a zero-gravity flight. What made you bring these different images together?
TOURMALINE: Marsha’s funeral procession was a literal pollination of the Hudson River, where her body was found. Everyone was taking sunflowers and dropping them onto the surface of the Hudson and pollinating the Hudson with Marsha’s ashes. This moment is the jumping off point—a dispersing of Marsha. My friend, the artist Tina Zavitsanos, talks about crystals: When a crystal breaks, is it a broken crystal or is there more crystal? Is the crystal being pollinated? It’s more like that. I think of all of these stories of flight—like in The People Could Fly, the series of Black folklore stories that Virginia Hamilton published, with illustrations by Diane and Leo Dillon—and Marsha naming her organization STAR after the furthest expanses of the imagination. Stonewall and the Apollo moon landing happened around the same time, and Marsha was really captivated by space and space flight.
My dad was a Pisces, and his embodied life ended in a similar kind of confusion; his body was found much later after he died. The film is really about tuning to the score that Danni Venne created using these tuning forks that NASA commissioned that are set to the frequency of one rotation of Venus around the sun. So it’s all about calibrating to a frequency or a vibe, a feeling that things only expand. Pollination is only ever increasing. There’s only ever more life of Marsha P. Johnson.
ZN: Your book is really attentive to where different images of Marsha live. The exhibition will also include a photograph of Marsha by Bettye Lane from Harvard’s Schlesinger Library. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on how Marsha navigated visibility—not just politically, but how she navigated the world of images and made images, even when she wasn’t literally capturing them herself.
TOURMALINE: I write about how she really wanted to be a star. She walked onto MGM Studios’ lot in Hollywood and was like, “Give me a job.” They told her to fill out this application and go to the back of the line. And she was like, “I’m definitely not gonna do that.” She also went for an audition for this film called The Happy Hooker, and they were like, “Actually, you’re not the right part.” And she said, “Well, actually I’m gonna march down to Andy Warhol’s office and not change and make him take a bunch of photographs of me.”
When I heard her talking about that, it wasn’t how I previously understood that experience with Warhol. In other interviews, she just talks about how much that work was selling for. She was able to hold the critique and also know that she was the subject even though she was the object. Saidiya Hartman writes a lot about that in Scenes of Subjection: how moving from object to subject, or moving from no agency to autonomy and agency, are sometimes traps in and of themselves. Marsha lived with that knowledge.
ZN: Going back to the exhibition, self-portraiture is a thread that runs between the film Pollinator and an accompanying series of photographs. I’m curious about how you came to self-portraiture.
TOURMALINE: Part of self-portraiture came to me when I was doing photography in Boston in the early ’90s. A big part of my practice was work about me and my siblings and my immediate community. This is an extension of that practice.
ZN: Harvard has been in the news a lot lately: It’s embroiled in a high-profile lawsuit with the Trump administration that many liberals have embraced as a gesture of resistance, even as it has ruthlessly suppressed Palestine solidarity activism and scholarship on campus. Have you thought about how your work will land in such a charged context?
TOURMALINE: My work is about social movements and calibrating to clarity, to get to the solution side of the wave. I’m hoping that it offers the opportunity for people to connect and resonate—through moments of quiet, moments of reflection, and moments of seeing that we have been in the midst of a mess of a thing before, and in those big problems we have found big solutions. That’s what the work is offering.
ZN: Your show will include a reading area with contributions from queer archives and libraries from around Harvard and beyond, including the Digital Transgender Archive, the Cambridge Public Library, and so on. Could you say a bit about those partnerships?
TOURMALINE: Part of how I came to my work was in the library. I spent so much time in Boston in different libraries. Instead of having a babysitter, my siblings and I were dropped off at the Mission Hill library. It’s important to me for there to be different ways to access the ideas that underpin this body of work, and the library will be one of them. Digital Transgender Archive, for example, is such an incredible resource for connecting to past movements and people. Marsha’s long-form interviews are part of it—the ones where she talks about being part of ACT UP while also being in beauty school and not feeling like there’s a dichotomy between showing up in social movement spaces and also pursuing glamour and beauty.
ZN: The show is something of a homecoming—how does it feel to be showing your work in Boston?
TOURMALINE: It definitely feels like a full-circle moment. This is where I started my art practice. I spent a lot of time as a teen in Harvard Square, and I also took the 66 bus to high school. I was waiting for hours right next to the Carpenter Center.
ZN: Much of your recent work has examined rest, pleasure, and plenitude, which for trans and Black people have always been practiced amid brutal and precarious conditions. It doesn’t feel right to frame this dilemma as new, but it feels like an especially difficult moment to balance rest and pleasure against the need to be attentive to the world’s catastrophes. How are you navigating this?
TOURMALINE: I think it’s important to not make it a binary between rest and pleasure and attending to the world. That seems like a trap. The Black organization Nap Ministry is on the forefront of offering this insight: When we’re moving with the clarity that pleasure and rest offer us, we have a greater capacity to show up in the world and turn a problem into a solution.
When I was in my I-am‑an‑organizer-first era, I thought a lot about people who had a sense of longevity in it. Whether it was Miss Major or Suzanne Pharr or Angela Davis—all people I’ve worked closely with—part of their practice of showing up in the world was tending to their interiority. Angela Davis, for instance, talks a lot about how systemic violences don’t just affect our material condition. They affect how we feel about ourselves. And so our strategy for transforming the world needs to touch upon our interior condition.
As an organizer getting frustrated with my work in 2014, I knew that all of this work—on Medicaid, healthcare, housing, welfare, and abolition in the most concrete sense, like stopping a jail from being built in a community I was a part of—was so powerful and urgent and necessary. But the gap between changing a condition and feeling like what I want was possible was getting bigger and bigger. Even though I had experienced these concrete campaign wins, a lot of my friends were dying. I was feeling at odds with the world and myself, and art, for whatever reason, gave me a path to shifting some of that interiority.
I also think about the legacy of the Black Codes. A lot of my black-and-white self-portraiture is working around how the history of the term “lazy”—or terms like “not paying attention” or “not doing anything”—is imbued with the afterlife of slavery. Under the Black Codes, if you didn’t have a job, you were threatened with carceral control. I was really grappling with those interior ideas about needing to produce all the time, needing to be attentive all the time, never pausing, never slowing down, and how that has a current that comes out of slavery times and the Black Codes.
ZN: I’d be curious to hear more of your thoughts about the art world. It’s interesting to talk to someone who had a more ambivalent relationship with it and then came closer.
TOURMALINE: It wasn’t ambivalent—I hated these people! But then I realized part of that was I just wanted to be freely doing what I wanted, and I was mad because they got to do it. I was also thinking, “How come we’re over here having to deal with the conditions of our lives, and they’re over there seemingly having so much fun?” But there are so many different clusters and parts of the art world, right?
Parts of the art world don’t feel very alive. They might be filled with events and action, but they are not helping me find a pathway to the things that I care about.
ZN: Are there particular kinds of spaces that you feel are alive to you, versus not so much?
TOURMALINE: It’s not necessarily like X institution or Y collective, like which one is better. It’s more like, Well, how are we approaching where we are? Are we connected to any kind of historical understanding of where we’re finding ourselves? Are we seeking to remember that these conditions are changeable and saying “Let’s change them?” Or are we just being down on ourselves and other people?
