Artist and SVA Alumnus Kembra Pfahler on D.I.Y. and Building Community
The multidisciplinary artist and musician talks about her open-ended practice and her time at the School of Visual Arts
By Greg Herbowy
June 17, 2025
“It’s hard work to be a full-time artist for all of your life,” says Kembra Pfahler (1982 Fine Arts), and, by her own admission, she has not made it easy on herself. Pfahler was still a student at SVA when she coined the term “availabism”—meaning the use of whatever is readily at hand, whether household objects or one’s own body, as creative material—and it continues to be the guiding principle of her sprawling, DIY, commercially indifferent practice.
Pfahler grew up in coastal Southern California with an artistic mother, a surfer father, and, after her parents’ split, a lawyer stepfather whose clientele included musicians like Bootsy Collins and Parliament-Funkadelic. In 1983, just a few years after moving to New York City, she organized “The Extremist Show”—a nine-day event at the collectively run ABC No Rio arts space that combined outré performances with paintings, writings, and other works by herself and others, including her close friend and classmate, the late Gordon Kurtti (1981 Fine Arts). The show was emblematic of her now-decades-long career, a welcoming but unyielding rebellion against conventional ideas of beauty, morality, gender, and sexuality
that freely mixes performance and music with drawings, paintings, and sculpture.
For all her individuality, Pfahler is also a collaborator and peer who peppers her conversation with tributes to her friends and forebears. In the ’80s and ’90s, she was an integral performer in the Cinema of Transgression, a loosely affiliated group of filmmakers that made no-budget, taboo-busting work. In 1990, she and her then-husband, Samoa Moriki, founded the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, a combination punk band and troupe named for the cult actress, one of Pfahler’s favorites. The act spent several years playing unsuspecting venues throughout the U.S. and established Pfahler’s reputation as a singular frontwoman, her presence made unshakably alien with blackened teeth, full body paint, and massive wigs. And in 2014, Pfahler, with fellow artists and musicians Anohni, CocoRosie, and Johanna Constantine, co-curated “Future Feminism” at the Hole gallery on Manhattan’s Bowery. In addition to an exhibition, the event included a 13-night performance and lecture series featuring artists like Laurie Anderson, Kiki Smith, and one of Pfahler’s former SVA teachers, Lorraine O’Grady. ( … )