Penelope Gould

Penelope is a playwright and performance scholar with an expansive practice that also includes painting, zines, poetry, dioramas, and wheat paste campaigns. Across mediums, her work often engages with the topics of fatness, queerness, artist identities, and housing.

Her words have been published in Girls in Trouble and NYU Local. Her work has been presented at The Tank, Berkeley Rep, PlayGround SF, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, Rory Meyers College of Nursing, and on the streets of New York. She’s also worked in the literary departments of Crowded Fire Theater, New Georges, and The Tank.

She currently engages visitors in the history of Queens, New York as a docent at Vander Ende Onderdonk House, the oldest Dutch Colonial stone house in New York City.

Title of Capstone Project

Carving the Fat Body

Description of Capstone Project

Carving the Fat Body is a zine and community performance project. The zine features the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf and self portraits by Nona Faustine (b.1977), Laura Aguilar (b. 1959), and Catherine Opie (b. 1961) to look at ways of carving the fat body across time and space that move away from the goal of smallness. I am distributing these zines at NYC bariatric surgery centers and weight loss centers. The zines are unsigned but include an email should a reader desire to open a dialogue on my pamphlet. This zine expands my previous performance studies research on “Carving the Fat Body” and “Making Monument in Nona Faustine’s The White Shoes” generated in seminars on performance histories and race and performance. The distribution project is inspired particularly by Adrian Piper’s Calling Cards and José Estaban Muñoz’s citation of sticker campaigns in Cruising Utopia. Ttyl!

What Inspired Your Project?

This is an interventionist feminist art piece where Penelope enters the world of diet culture to question it from the inside.