Buzz Slutzky is a non-binary/transgender and Jewish multidisciplinary artist, educator, writer, curator, and performer based in Brooklyn. Their work is variably autobiographical and historical, such as their Anne Frank/Justin Beiber mash-up, Religious Beliebs. Their practice juxtaposes text and image through video, drawing, performance, pyrography (woodburning), and other mediums.
Buzz’s video Clothes Feelings (2016), which was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, uses loose drawings of clothing with voiceover anecdotes to explore their humorous experiences navigating gender presentation as a non-binary person.
Buzz’s current drawing and video project “Looking Forward to Being Attacked” reckons with their Jewish/Texan family history through their series of drawings of photographs from heirloom instructional manuals about self-defense and sculpture. The project investigates the ways that epigenetics and parenting might pass down ideas about art making in addition to trauma.
Pre-pandemic, Buzz was performing under the musical comedy persona Stoni Butchell, a wealthy queer Texan Jew who told stories about their shopping obsessions, hypochondriac spirals, and hot takes on queer culture. Buzz currently teaches filmmaking at The New School, visual art at SUNY Purchase, and is a teaching artist at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art.
Portrait by Sarah Tricker
