About
Patty Gone is a performer, poet, artist, and educator. She makes art where the queer imagination and white working-class imagination crash and fall in love. Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Gone draws inspiration from the art forms popular in her hometown. By contorting romance novels, soap operas, or sit-coms into surreal essay-poems, Gone strips the familiar to reveal its zany and irrational core. Incorporating aspects of performance, video art, writing, and installation, Gone both questions and exalts the mainstream by placing kitsch objects, such as Goodwill silks, embroidered platitudes, and children’s toys into dream-like sets and settings. According to critic Nick Salvato, Gone arranges these “simultaneously poetic and preposterous props” into “a renovated Gurlesque for a new decade,” worshipping Lisa Simpson, Peter Pan, or Danielle Steel as transgender surrogates of suburbia.

Gone is the author of “Love Life” (Mount Analogue, 2019) and her writing has appeared in publications including The Believer, Hyperallergic, Art Papers, and jubilat. She has performed or exhibited her work at the Queens Museum, The Poetry Project, Smack Mellon, LACE, Human Resources, Wendy’s Subway, REDCAT, and Porn Film Festival Berlin, as well as bars, DIY venues, and backyards. She has received funding and support from UCLA, NYU, Mass MoCA, Northampton Open Media, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She lives in Los Angeles, and asks you to protect and support trans kids.

PressBemis Center
Variable West
The Believer
Brooklyn Review
NYC Trans Oral History Project
The Stranger
Seattle Weekly