SHE DRAGS IN CROCS

APRIL 27 - JUNE 8, 2024

Friends Artspace is delighted to present She Drags in Crocs by Brazilian-born, Arkansas-based artist Bia Furtado.

At the exhibition’s center is legendary Brazilian folklore villain, Cuca, the crocodilian woman who eats disobedient children. Furtado memorializes the mythical Boogeyman in obsidian-glazed ceramic, with long, sharp fingernails and flowers growing out of her back. Cuca’s origin story stretches back hundreds of years and across an ocean. Old Iberian tales tell of Cuca as a powerful shapeshifter—at times a witch and a revered dragon. Her eventual transfiguration into a nightmarish beast is an age-old patriarchal machination, echoing Medusa and Eve, where reptiles are linked to undesirable women.

Furtado reimagines her Cuca centerpiece as a prodigious drag queen with long blonde hair, and playfully surrounds her heroine with 100 Croc shoes, glazed in the same finish as the alligator herself. Each Croc memorializes a different BIPOC drag queen. Their emblazoned names and custom Jibbitz transform the shoes into vessels of resistance, mirroring Cuca to celebrate queer glamor without apology.