About the Artist

Blew Velvet (He/They), b. 1993

Blew Velvet is a musician and performance artist whose work has moved between sound design, dance, costume and visual media since 2012. Born in central California and raised on the Florida Gulf Coast, they have spent their life on the move, making installation-minded work that outlasts, or immortalizes, the temporary spaces it’s made for.

Velvet came up in the queer DIY scene. At eighteen they moved, almost by accident, into a radical queer commune in the Tennessee woods. The community shaped their early work and launched their artistic life through DIY residencies at Merman Manor (Atlanta), Sassafras and Idyll Dandy Arts (Tennessee), where they finished their first performance piece, Evoke. After two years coordinating and performing at the IDApalooza arts festival, they joined a nine-week national tour as a principal cast member, alongside Sofia Moreno, Clothilde Erlisle Double and Jail Flanagan.

They then settled in New Orleans and turned toward street performance, collaborative installation, dance and theater, a style they and their collaborators named parade tableau. Works from this period include Magna Mater, which debuted at Baltimore’s Transmodern Performance Art Festival, and Mourning Would, a one-act counter-tenor opera made with Lucia Honey and commissioned for Edgezone’s Contemporary Art Fair during Art Basel Miami.

In 2018 Velvet relaunched in New York, retiring the name SSTR and working under their own. They collaborated with performers and musicians including Charlene Incarnate, Whitney Weiss, Protopapa, The Carry Nation, Ariel Zetina, Colin Self and Lauren Flax, and with designers and fabricators including Chiquitita, Pinwheel Pinwheel, Guelmo Rosa, Vincent Tiley, Sho Konishi and Wiederhoeft. They also worked as a freelance installation artist and prop stylist for stage, video and commercial projects.

Their debut EP, Frankie, came out on January 31, 2020, on their own label, Velvet Touch Records, distributed through AWAL. The album Touch Me, written through distance, heartbreak and reconciliation, followed independently in summer 2022. After a year in Mexico City, Velvet moved to Germany, and with it, away from avant-garde pop toward club music and ambient. In August 2023 they launched Radio Samt, a monthly series that ran for a full year, in which 12 guests from their global community of collaborators, friends and fellow artists delivered feature-length ambient, experimental, live or irregular sets.