Keith Lafuente

Extended Hours: Saturday, November 15, 12pm to 7pm

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SoMad, the femme and queer led art space just south of Madison Square Park, is proud to present a solo exhibition by 2025 artists-in-residence Keith Lafuente, marking the culmination of Lafuente’s five-month residency.

In Acts of Service, Keith Lafuente examines the many connotations of “service” — sexual, military, culinary, religious, and altruistic — through a carnivalesque installation of kinetic and static sculptures. Animated stuffed fabric figures perform exchanges of labor and desire: a go-go boy waiter serves on top of a table, and a sailor pole dances on a pig spit for a voyeuristic audience including tarsiers and turtles. Their automation is a cycle, a structure visible to the audience but not to the characters in their own world.

Lafuente’s work is deeply informed by Filipino hospitality traditions and the global inequities of labor shaped by colonial history. His references to kink culture further complicate notions of what society deems empowering, degrading, or beautiful.

Across media, including sculpture, painting, performance, film, and fashion, Keith Lafuente builds colorful worlds that feature characters navigating desire, power, and belonging via adornment and embodiment. Keith plays with Filipino-ness like a fabric that can be cut, sewn, unpicked, and reworked, pulling apart threads of idealized nostalgia for the past, domination by colonial regimes, and culturally ingrained values of service and adaptation. With a camp sensibility, Keith weaves in his own queer, diasporic experiences from growing up in the United States–critically reimagining both Filipino-ness and Americanness.

Keith is a current artist in residence at SoMad. His short film Binibining Iniibig premiered in 2024. His work has been included in exhibitions at, among others, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York; New Release, New York; Pracownia Portretu, Poland; Pullproof, Pittsburgh; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, San José, California. His designs and drag have been featured in publications including The Cut, Cultured, Harper’s Bazaar Hong Kong, and Gayletter. Keith holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University.