Kitty Rauth would definitely have bought the flowers themself, were they to be situated into a Woolfian party preparation paradigm. They are the quintessential “life of the [dinner] party,” enlisting participation, camaraderie, and collaboration against a backdrop of seduction and entropy expressed as latent, curtly disarming signifiers for underlying discourses on desire and death—and particularly the ways bodies are read in relationship to perceived indulgences and mortality, that is, a confluence of fatness, queerness, flamboyance, and histrionically staged intellectual debate over the efficacies of feuding models of care and interdependency.

Rauth (she/they) installs fête galante in the liminal passage between yore’s tree of life and tree of knowledge. One mythological tree has been hewn into furniture, and the other yields a cursed but discursively potent fruit harvest: here a collapsed dinner table piled with table settings cast in hardened caramel sugar candy; there a cascading stack of similarly sugar cast champagne stemware; and elsewhere the slyly luscious bounty of so many fruits cast in ballistic gelatin (a discomfiting material sourced from forensic tests that simulate human bodies’ vulnerabilities to attack with various weapons). Bodies and food, utensils, and the dinners that hold them are all melted into one another in Rauth’s fantasia of excess. Body (person), dinner (place), food (thing) collapse into neither-this-nor-that-but-both-and-more hybrids of living biosphere indicators straying into the gaps between narrow taxonomies. Rauth activates proposals for extra-human conceptions of justice and abundance that might resemble the enchanted, singing, dancing furniture in Disney’s “Be Our Guest” number from Beauty and the Beast. In so doing, the politics of fat as big, unwieldy, perverse, and difficult to contain are heightened in Rauth’s Havisham-like installation-based tableau.

As in their recent installation “The Mirror Room” at Arcadia University, Kitty follows the breadcrumbs from mores and comportments typically taken for granted and susses out complicated histories wherein colonialism, capital, bodily autonomy, gift economies, indoctrination, consumption, and several many other subtexts that reinforce power relations and privilege are boiled into provocative, discussion-stirring party favors.

Dream sequence for an art canonical food court: a grand dining hall cafeteria arranged with tables and place settings and meal preparation. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party smuggled out of the Sackler wing of the Brooklyn Museum. Leonardo’s Last Supper along with a bevy of other period renderings of the Last Supper gathered around it as dinner guests. Daniel Spoerri’s Snare Pictures and Laura Letinsky’s photographs which evidence day-later residue of meals that were had. Broodthaers’ pots of mussels. Kathleen Ryan’s sculptural renderings of decaying fruits encrusted in precious stones. Austin-based Rick Fleming’s cardboard soda cans. Perhaps more than art historical context, these associations work together with Rauth’s practice to call forth an apocryphal dancing table written about by queer theorist and feminist Sara Ahmed. As in Ahmed’s conception, Kitty excites the border spaces and imposes intersections between orientation, class, and cultural takes on health—in particular intolerant medicojuridical systems that circulate less than scientifically sound biases about health and happy bodies.

Alongside their evolving studio practice and the language of object-making therein, Rauth also distinguishes themself as a bright and driven community organizer, currently elbows deep into art non-profits, higher education, fundraising, advocating, event planning, and even more grassroots experiments in community building. So while their sculptural tableau are presided over by ghosts and the refrains of a queer studies/fat studies/death study discourse, there is, at close range, a lively crowd of dinner guests who attend get-togethers, potlucks, and parties that orbit around Kitty Rauth’s relocation to Chicago several years ago. Pressuring the tenets of Bishop’s Artificial Hells, Kitty insists on a kind of social and institutional optimism that invites, enlists, and activates communities into an enthusiastically rendered cultural counternarratives wherein outsized and outlying positions are better understood, appreciated, and cared for.




What are your beauty secrets?

As a messy femme, there is absolutely no organization to my beauty routine. I wash my face maybe 50% of the time, all my lipsticks are stolen or hand me downs, and I can’t keep a set of matching earrings to save my life. The closest thing I have to brand allegiance is my Pat McGrath eyeliner and the pink and green Maybelline mascara. So perhaps my beauty secret is chaos and a whirlwind lifestyle.



What’s the matter?

Too much to do, not enough time! Everyone is like “time is a construct” but somehow I feel like I'm chasing it every day? I want to hang out with all my friends, organize and go on trips, see everyone’s art and also make my own, feed people good food, swim in the lake every day in the summer, pet my cat, spread the secrets of the universe to my students, be good at my job, and SLEEP but I simply cannot milk enough minutes out of the day.



What is your greatest extravagance?

Taught well by my friends and Queers of Taste, Andrew Sokol & Tahler Johnson, I now buy Kirkland Prosecco by the case at Costco. Because it’s always on hand, I bring two to every party- one to shake and pop, one to drink.



Pouring Kirkland prosecco for the cast sugar coup toast at the opening of “The Dinner Party” at Collective62 in Miami, curated by Yi Chin Hsieh last January.



What is your most treasured possession?

My chosen family- those that I know I can always count on and want to build my life with. When I think about what I have that’s most important in my life, it’s always my people over anything else.



Do you keep a diary?

No, I’ve always thought keeping a diary would be very romantic, but I am a) not disciplined enough to sit down and write out anything on the daily and b) actually quite nervous about keeping a living document of my emotions and reflections. In a discussion group about Lou Sullivan’s edited diaries that my roommate Emrys Brandt hosted last summer, the group talked about the space between the reality of one's experience and their written diary, and then between diary and memoir, as it relates to icon- or self myth-building. When I think about how I might build my own lore, I think I trust myself to extrapolate meaning and nuance after the fact rather than let my Cancer emotions run loose in the moment it’s happening.



What or who is the greatest love of your life?

This feels like a difficult question in that my answer is not one thing, but a collection of experiences, a history of lived lives. Queerness and its shape shifting expansiveness has opened my life beyond what I could have ever imagined when I was younger. The relationships who stretched my politics and showed me what is possible, the writers contextualizing our existence, the ghosts of those who organized for our futures- collectively, that is the greatest love of my life. My life would be smaller if not for the models of what is possible.



When and where were you happiest?

Last summer, I ventured back to the gay woods of Tennessee, a magical and complicated place that I first discovered in 2019 through an old Philly roommate and close friend that now lives on a queer land project down there. There are 2000 acres of queer-owned land in that area and once or twice a year since, I’ve made the pilgrimage to spend some time off grid amongst rural queers, trans people and faeries. I prefer to venture out there during quieter times when you can really dig in and get to know people and listen to the histories of the spaces and just be with the land. This last time though, I went for their huge Beltane celebration and brought a handful of Chicago fam that I’m building a life beside so that they too could experience the magic of one of the oldest land projects down there. The space was overwhelming, felt temporarily utopian, and existed at this really difficult convergence of my past and present. Through it though, I realized this place contributes heavily to the process of becoming my best self, reckons with politics that are easy to forget while grinding in my life and practice, and pushes me to grow continuously with other people. I guess for me happiness doesn’t always exist as an easy emotion, but as a jumbled mess of love and freedom and hope and change.



QTs Lacey & Bun at Beltane last year.



What was your first job?

At 16, I got hired as a Junior Counselor at the residential Girl Scout camp I grew up going to. I got paid $600 for 8 weeks of living and working, and was responsible for 40 7-12 year old girls on a weekly basis. It was a wild ride of mostly unsupervised babies taking care of babies, but that freedom allowed me to really figure out who I was and how I navigated the world. It taught me how to share space, collectively organize, take responsibility for myself and my work, and developed my current-day camp counselor energy. It was extremely difficult work that I find nostalgia softens the edges of, but it absolutely shaped me into the person I am today.



Me in 2007, 15 years old as a Counselor in Training.



Which living person do you most admire?

When I think about my mom’s life, what she has endured and grown from, how she has worked to locate her own happiness and sought healing, it’s undoubtedly her. She maintains a very Libra balance in the relationships in her life, recognizing the right moments for how to approach hard conversations, and has proven throughout my adulthood that she’s excited and willing to learn even when something is deeply unfamiliar to her life. I’ve watched her continually grow as a person alongside me, an inspirational feat when many people of her generation remain stagnant.



If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

I think I would like to be reincarnated as a pop star. I think I could really have a fun time with that one. Otherwise, maybe a bewitched teapot or a thorny rosebush.



What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Chastity, obviously???



Do you cook? If no, how do you feed yourself? If yes, do you have a signature recipe?

Oh I cook! I don’t really have a signature recipe though. I’m too busy testing different dishes, skimming the internet or texting friends for advice, flipping through Yotam Ottolenghi cookbooks, wordy cooking blog posts or the diaries of Julia Child for new things to try. My champion meals of the last year- steamed crab in the rain for my birthday, learning how to make zongzi from Jasmine Yeh, and the first of many full traditional Christmas dinners now that I have taken over the meal for my family.



From "Fata Morgana," a "Round Table" meal in collaboration with Jasmine Yeh in June 2023, photo credit: Eugene Tang.



What did you have for breakfast?

A fried egg runny yolk on a revived piece of leftover focaccia.



How do you usually sleep?

Tucked in, cold air, wrapped around my pregnancy pillow or ideally another warm body.



What questions are you asking yourself?

Currently: How do I strike a balance between rest, labor and relationships? What do I give to others and what do I keep for myself? What am I making for dinner?



Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

Everyone in my life is “angel” or “baby” or “baby angel”. Sometimes even people I don't know that well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



Which talent would you most like to have?

A knack for picking up languages would be amazing- a tool towards easier connection.



What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Honestly, the fact that I’m still a working artist and continue to hustle for this lifestyle. I had a really beautiful and affirming conversation last summer about the struggles of continuing to make work in the midst of surviving as a queer person. As we recounted all the ways that we’ve sacrificed stability for our own happiness and ambitions, we reminded ourselves of how hard it is to do this, to get here and stay here and thrive in it. Still being here really does feel like an achievement.



Describe your work space. What qualities do you need in your environment to do what you do?

My studio is a big open space on the third floor of a warehouse that I share with 14 other artists. The physical setup works well for me because of its openness to the communal space- there’s no door in my personal space, so anyone that comes through while I’m working can stop in, chat about their day and see what I’m up to. I thrive in spaces where I know there are other working bodies milling around that I can tap into for an extra pair of hands or bit of gossip to perk me up. Beyond my personal space, a place to gather, hang out, and host others is really important for me for similar reasons. The space is a constant work-in-progress, amenities being added every week by my busy little studio mates, the most exciting recent addition being a swing made and installed by Fick Patterson!



From the Liberationist Seder "Round Table" event that I hosted in in collaboration with Gabriel Chalfin-Piney and Liel Dolev in April 2023, photo credit: Eugene Tang.



Describe your dream date.

Multiple days long, interspersed with long & lingering sex in fun and unexpected places, good food that we make together, and swimming naked in some natural body of water. A cabana in the woods, maybe? A cabana anywhere honestly.



Where would you most like to live?

An old Victorian that I can paint pink, situated on a big plot of land for me and all my people. Rural and private enough for uninterrupted living but accessible to a city. With a natural spring, 4 seasons, and a big barn for shared studio space!



Which living person do you most despise?

It honestly depends on the day and what mood you have caught me in. Maybe it's whatever politician or billionaire is making our lives hell this week; maybe it's the developer weaponizing justice language to displace artists; maybe it's the disgusting man on the street harassing my friends for being their cute freaky selves. There's a lot of room for loathing in here ♥



What do you most value in your friends?

A willingness to actively show up for each other in whatever ways they can, the desire to continue growing as a person together and separately, and the space to let others make mistakes and learn.



What do you most enjoy wearing?

I love a costume- I was gay-raised on themed house parties in West Philly and I long for more opportunities to take an assignment and run with it. I want pink, I want drama, I want camp, I want sparkles! That’s when I feel best. I have some special pieces tucked away, too niche or wild for everyday wear, waiting for their moment to shine. More theme parties, Chicago!



My partner Zola and my award-winning gardener & topiary tree costume from ACRE’s Halloween party last year.



Who are your favorite writers?

I’m not sure I have a favorite writer specifically, but I think the work I have been most consistently moved by is from Octavia Butler. In conversations and studio visits, I find that her work slips into my reading suggestions for others almost constantly.



Do you have a favorite film?

Titanic, forever- a perfect mix of drama, historical costume and love story. Best experienced as a tragic lesbian love story since young Leo is the true butch heartthrob.



Is there an album or piece of music you listen to the most?

This changes with the seasons- this winter it's been Sufjan Stevens’ heartbreaking Javelin, a smattering of Lana and my Valentine’s playlists, but the albums I will always return to, top to bottom, are Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Arthur Russell’s Love Is Overtaking Me.



What are you reading right now?

I often read 2 or three things at the same time. Right now the rotation is Provence, 1970- a recounting of the convening of influential American chefs and food writers in France that had a large part in shifting American food culture- and On Community by Casey Plett, an essay about the nuances and complications of community from a trans perspective.



Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Does Samwise Gamgee count as a historical figure? I’m gonna say yes! Sam was a Cancer-Taurus almost definitely. For all of his hobbit-ness but also the unwavering commitment to his most definite romantic friendship with Frodo.



Is there anything you regret not doing?

A million things, mostly in small interactions in relationships. Not apologizing in a thoughtful way, not communicating well, not paying more specific attention, not being my best self. I try not to regret doing or not doing in terms of larger life events and choices- I am sailing that “everything happens for a reason” ship and it has seemingly served me for the past 30 years.



Favorite drink?

A heavily carbonated Italian soda with rose syrup or a brut champagne. Something with bubbles.



"Hostess," 2024, sugar, ribbon @ Collective62, Miami FL.



Favorite smell?

The late spring air in the NJ Pine Barrens during the first camping trip of the season.



Favorite color?

Pink pink pink!



Favorite time of day?

In bed with a lover, in the first moments in between sleep and wake where we’re just starting to feel our own bodies again and neither of us is thinking about the responsibilities of the day to come. The light coming in from the window is still kind of hazy where I can see the dust particles floating in the air and I’m tucked into their arm, probably wiping away my own drool.



Where do you dance?

In my friends’ living rooms, at the beach, in the grocery store, wherever there’s pop music playing.



Do you have anything going on or coming up you want to plug?
Where can people find you? Website address? Instagram handle?

I’m in the midst of a few things- a solo show at Arcadia University outside of Philly called “The Mirror Room” that just opened, a sweet little group show of mostly candles called “Unbroken Chain” at The Franklin, & “Sacred Whole”, a forthcoming group show at LVL3 beside Jacqueline Zazueta and Ruschwoman baddie Matt Morris herself! Ruby Que and I are toying around with putting together a queer anthology of short stories on fantasy this summer, and there’s a possible new Round Table dinner in the works. You can keep up with my life & work on instagram at @_sugarm0mmy_ and on my new & improved website designed by Kaylee Spears at www.kittyrauth.com. ♥ ♥ ♥



"Underbelly" (detail), urethane molding & latex paint, 24”x30”, “The Mirror Room” at Arcadia University, Glenside, PA