New Pussy, New Portraiture: Agnes Walden in Conversation with Angela Dufresne
This interview was originally published in July 2025 for WUSSY Vol. 14 — order a copy
Angela Dufresne calls herself a painting bottom. As an artist, some of her credentials include a small town Catholic upbringing in Kansas, a move to San Francisco in the 90s with both of her girlfriends, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the acquisition of a painting by trans punk icon Jayne County. Her work is characterized by a wet-on-wet sensuous virtuosity, a fusion of painting’s vocabularies with underground and popular cinema, and an insistence on porous exchange in all matters formal and theoretical. She is a dedicated steward of what we inherit as queers of intellect and conscience, and her paintings constantly diagram and re-enact a solemn yet perverse duty to allow that cultural inheritance to move through us. Years ago, Angela was my professor in grad school at Rhode Island School of Design, where I taught with her as a TA. Our friendship is grounded in our mutual love of painting, Kim Deal, 20th c. divas, and rigorous appraisal of queer art writ large.
A few months after my vaginoplasty, I dared Angela on a whim to paint a cover of Gustave Courbet’s 1886 painting L’Origine du monde with me as the model. Unflappable, she told me I better not be joking, because she’d do it in a heartbeat. We got to work. We spent a few months intermittently sitting for two paintings made simultaneously: one L’Origine “money shot,” and one large full length portrait. She then went on to make six smaller self-portraits of her own, using the large portrait of me as a backdrop.
Courbet’s L’Origine is a small erotic oil painting that was privately commissioned by a wealthy diplomat. It depicts a close-up of a woman’s vulva and bush. Compositionally cropped at the torso, the woman’s legs are spread open, as she leans back with a bedsheet obscuring her head. The painting has long held totemic power as a primary text in the male gaze, stoking both antiquated ideas of artistic genius and feminist rebuttals to such notions.
No small part of Dufresne’s brilliance as an artist is her willingness to put herself at risk on the plane of authorship, which was the dare lurking behind the dare that I proposed in painting my new vag in the tradition of Courbet (I’d be remiss not to shout out Dr. Avanessian, our fifth artistic collaborator, after Courbet and his model). I had dared Dufresne to construct meaning from an image haunted by convergent histories of power, pathology, and cliché, complicated by her own assessment of her obligation toward me as her sitter, all while remaining attentive to her sensory experience of our time together in the present tense. Clumsiness and misreading were inevitable, but Angela nobly stared down my plucky new vulva for hours regardless. Call it “the chaser gaze.” As the paintings took shape, our cheeky model/maestro dynamic brought further art historical precedents to the surface. Angela eventually hung her own self portraits in a grid surrounding the large portrait of me, conjuring formal associations with the narrative panel sequencing in 14th c. Sienese painter Duccio’s Maestà altarpiece, which I had recently seen on view at the Met. I recast Angela again, this time as archetypal late modernist patriarch-painter Lucien Freud, and she readily took on the discomfort and power that this position entailed. I, in turn, waited spread-eagle on the corner of a stool in her backyard shed-turned-studio, eager to find out which of Freud’s portrait subjects I might become: would it be performance artist Leigh Bowery, painter Celia Paul, or a dog asleep at the painter’s feet?
In February, I interviewed Angela in her Williamsburg studio, where we discussed productive misreadings, modernist heroics, and new and old strategies for how painting might accurately map our obligations toward one another.
Agnes Walden: I want to start with our L’Origine du Monde painting. I’m thinking about cliché and reference — how making an art historical reference is one thing, and how cliché is an order of magnitude further, usually veering into kitsch or bad taste. Here it sets up a really exciting formal and critical relationship to transfemininity, and the too-literalness of transsexuality, with regard to pop culture and queer theory and all these discourses that we’re mollusks on the boat of from our position as painters.
Angela Dufresne: Right. I think the transphobic thing to say, or certainly the dualistic thing to say would be: literally why do you have to have something when you can imagine it, when you can project a haptic, sexual, sensual experience into your body? Do you need to change the body to produce that kind of an experience? And the courage of the trans woman is: yes, right? To align yourself with female sexuality and make this haptic intervention that the imagination can’t make. It is actually beyond the imaginable in a funny way, even though it is so ridiculously literal. Does that make sense?
AW: It does! Bring it back to painting for me.
AD: There’s this idea that it’s impossible for paint to truly represent something or to truly become something. What's the problem with being literal? If we know it's still just undulating blobs of matter on a surface, right? I have this painting of Werner Schroeter whipping his penis out and peeing. And I'm not afraid to put the peeing in there and have it be effectual, to have it be natural. I always splatter the drips when I'm painting piss, which I’ve painted a lot. It’s why I love the Courbet painting, however misogynistic it is. This proto-feminist, self-congratulatory idiocy that only a French dude could conjure up. But I still love it. I love looking at it. I love that he could be so literal and so cliché and so dumb. There's space for that in painting. And then it aligns with the conversations we had: this is a real pussy, but it is also constructed. But it's also what lived experience is like, what it's like to have these bodies, and to manifest, and to live out our desires, and to touch the world in ways that actually do something better for us than winning or succeeding or getting off or feeling safe, right?
AW: For me, as someone who's really invested in the optics and politics of trans visuality and the political project of trans cultural production, and maybe even has a reserved approach to these things in my own work, it was very easy for me to attach a lot of exciting but very real fears to these paintings. Those fears were neutralized by the fact that we were having fun and remixing these historical precedents. I'm sitting in your shed pantsless in the dead of winter and we’re arguing and it's a good time.
AD: And me staring and being like wow, no woman has ever asked me to, like, stare at her pussy. Even my lovers don't ask me to stare at their pussies. So this was insanely humbling, but not awkward, but that's only because you're one of a kind. It just seemed like the perfectly natural thing to do, whatever natural means. I hope that it just resonates as: wow, this pussy is really great. Because fucking Courbet did not capture the origin of the world. The larger painting of you is frenetic. It is not a realist painting. The smaller one is weird because I worked on it way more than the larger one. It feels totally different from the other paintings. There's a discipline to making sure that it isn't overly expressive, being truthful to what's happening as it is. I do really like them together, as one being a kind of character study and the other being a kind of objective study. I think the two of them need each other. I hope that it feels like there is good visibility happening here.
AW: What is good visibility?
AD: I don't know! That's for you to answer. In how you're framing it, it might mean that it’s so important to take risks and advocate and celebrate trans bodies, and that it should or could be fun.
AW: Frankly my biggest fear is a reading that isn’t skeptical of visibility.
AD: To a certain extent there is a bit of suspension of that skepticism. The diligence that I just described — due diligence to the visibility and the phenomenology and then the character study — requires a suspension of the skepticism of visibility, at least in me as does.
AW: Which is like my entire relationship to painting.
AD: Do tell!
AW: It’s premised on needing to be able to suspend that skepticism.
AD: You need to, you say?
AW: Yes. While also pulling up the guardrails or fortifying the castle walls or the moat or something like that. You remember my grad school paintings. I was so trapped between a super sincere love of the portrait and a decimating and outsized fear of how images of trans people function in other people’s imaginations.
AD: And the violence is going to happen whether the image exists or not.
AW: I think growing up as an artist and as a person in the world is understanding that this part is out of my hands. If there is anything that I find “liberating” about this project of ours, it is that there is no overt didacticism in that direction. I’m giving up the need to control. Not only can I displace the task of interpretation onto a viewer, but I can displace it onto you in a way where a viewer doesn’t know what’s something you directed and what’s something I did.
AD: Something that you said really freaked me out in a good way because you said you need to suspend it for painting. The majority of the time when I'm painting I am willfully making sure that I don't suspend it, actually maintaining the skepticism around representation. Whether through abstraction or surface or the freneticism of the image, I'm not creating these unbelievably masterful seductive images. This is where I become a modernist. They fall back into the way that they're constructed, and they become indexes of interpretation, indexical maps of how one experiences other bodies. Playing with the genre of portraiture as long as I've been doing it, that's the way that I feel safe about leaving the trace of my presence in the perception, right? And in that triangulation between the painting, the subject, and the maker. It’s just a trace of that relational map.
AW: I think we try to get to the same place. I'm trying to jump off and away from the paranoia that criticality sometimes requires. It is something I basically cannot drop.
AD: It freezes. It crystallizes one into a position of not being able to act, which doesn't help.
AW: Exactly. And to me that feels very much borne of experience, moving through the world as a trans woman and paranoia and vigilance and measuring safety, but projected onto criticality and the painted surface.
AD: We said something earlier about female subjectivity. Obviously there has been a lot of work to dismantle what’s hegemonic and what's canonical. I think there is a shared female subjectivity between us, dare I say?
AW: Gasp!
AD: So gaspworthy! I think there are crossover vernacular differences. These things sound very essentialist, but there’s a level of vulnerability in aligning oneself with the weirdos, and in the kinds of embodiment that fail to fulfill patriarchal power that we overlap in. Rather than it being a petrified or disempowered female subjectivity, it is the place where the fun is, where irreverent pleasures are.
AW: Where fun and safe and interesting forms of misreading and misrecognition can happen.
AD: Sometimes I feel like I have this unbelievable traffic-free highway into how powerful that is, and sometimes it just feels like a mess.
AW: Where are you now?
AD: I'm feeling a bit of a mess about it. So why don't you clean up my mess?
AW: But I love your mess, that's why I'm here! When I think about your practice writ large, and also when I look at this Duccio-esque arrangement of panels on your wall of your self-portraits and mine, I think about “casting,” as in casting a role, and your work’s relationship to cinema, and how this can function in your paintings. As we worked on these, I thought that maybe casting is the most generous way of inscribing this combination of misrecognition and recognition, or of inscribing the risk in that gesture.
AD: It is Duccio, isn’t it! I think about misinterpretation in really literal ways that are really dumb. There's a painting in Orvieto, for instance, The Resurrection of the Flesh by Signorelli. It's all about how the good souls get to re-animate themselves, come out of the ground, and shed their flesh. Their flesh comes back on their body and they float up to heaven, right? It's the resurrection of the flesh. And I look at that painting, and I was raised a good Catholic girl, but what it looks like to me are these skeletons crawling out of holes looking at hot guys' asses. I know the stories, but I'm reading into them this vernacular of desire that there's never actually been space for, for people being in touch with their feelings and trusting their observations. What do these things really look like, and how can I push on that? I learned how to do that in a lot of ways from artists like Nicole Eisenman or Otto Dix or Max Beckmann. These painters lean into the “off” reading. Some of them are queer, some of them aren’t, but they all have a gaze that is unverifiable in the way that history has been written. That's the way I think about it, but I think that's probably not as interesting as the way you're saying it. When you talk about casting, that's where I think my interpretation of misinterpretation is kind of dumb in a way. It's really literal. We look at something and we have an association that has nothing to do with the intent of the institutional structures these objects were produced for. I think some of it is actually picking up on what the artist was feeling that they couldn’t explicitly express at the time.
AW: I don't think what we're saying is too far off from each other as much as mine is just the social dimension, and yours is the historical dimension.
AD: And that we as people need to see what we need to see in these objects. We read them at this moment right now, today, given everything that's going on. And that's why the objects are so amazing, because a body experiences them authentically in the moment, right? When we're in that Siena show at the Met and we're having all of these feelings that exist here and now that are in an entanglement with these old paintings, and it's so fabulous and weird and nonsensical. There is a responsibility to both interpret and to also misinterpret, so that we can create new ways of seeing these things.
AW: I’m looking at your panels and I see these four self-portraits by you flanking this giant half nude portrait of me, arranged like a Duccio Maestà. The L’Origine is off to the right. Where do you see some of the things we’re talking about in the surface of these paintings?
AD: I had decided I was going to start making these self-portraits, and then you were always behind me because I was working on them at the same time. Then I was like, no, they might need to be together. It's not that I don't think that they are interesting paintings independently, but that’s the real manifestation of the looking and the listening and the trying to cast in an image the sociality between us. How do you manifest an image of what it means for this intergenerational queer friendship to happen?. How do we come up with forms that tell our stories, but do not just swap out the heroic subject in the same format? I believe that indexicality has a way of getting between the seductiveness of the image and the production of another heroic subject. I think awkwardness, humor, ridiculousness, irreverence, are ways of counteracting the fetish of the heroic subject. I'm not a big fangirl of heroic subject queer art. I don't want that for anybody, especially queers.
AW: I love everything you just said, and I think it encapsulates a lot of what we've been getting at. When I look at this, I think about the jokes I was making about the Lucian Freud-ification of Angela Dufresne that I was sort of forcing you into. He’s a sort of ridiculous model I've been thinking onto us. I was like, “Oh my god, why am I making myself Celia Paul?” Then you inevitably find a way in and around it that is fun, that neutralizes the power dynamic, even if “power dynamic” was always in quotes for this whole project.
AD: But I was just painting bottoming again!
AW: Of course, exactly! I cast you in this heroic posture, but in this Duccio format, you were able to find a way around that heroic posture that I really, really value because I'd been dreading the heroic subject position of the realized trans woman, you know? The transsexual embodied. A modernist approach to that body, one that’s about fragment and reassembly, is actually really hard to find a way around. At some point during these paintings I realized that that was the question for me.
AD: I think we're really onto something! This is one of the most difficult things to traverse as we try to figure out how to change what paintings do in the world from the modernist project to something that is way more entangled in the social world. These are the shifts that conceptual art and social practice and feminists and queer theory have done to painting. And it's a great gift. I remember once Jennifer Packer was in here; I was painting her. She was looking around the studio and she was like: how do you deal with the virtuosity in here? What are you going to do with it all? And I was like: uh, use it? For some reason I have these abilities, and I want to use them. But it's not about showing just how sparkly I can paint this light on the side of a fish.
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Agnes Walden is a painter and educator. In a practice spanning and combining allegory, portraiture, and archival sources, her work is concerned with operations of analogy in painting and in the trans subject. Recent exhibitions include solo shows Poultice at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Aurora consurgens at Launch F18, as well as Mercy Clubhouse, a show of collaborative works with Creighton Baxter at Spill in Red Hook. Her paintings and writing have been featured in publications including New American Paintings, OUT Magazine, and ASAP/Journal. She holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design, where she went on to teach as Visiting Assistant Professor of Drawing. Walden taught RISD’s first course in Transgender Studies, a studio-seminar course titled “Theorizing Trans Cultural Production.” She has received support from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Pratt Institute.
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Angela Dufresne is a painter and educator based in Brooklyn. With painting, drawing, printmaking, and performative works, she creates heterotopic narratives that embrace vulnerability, contradiction, and nuance. Her works are the result of irreverent interaction with various cultural archives: American vernaculars, the dredges of European aesthetics and philosophy, film, and literature and yes, the many histories of painting, lauded and loathed. She’s held solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, the Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz and the UCLA Hammer Museum. Gallery exhibitions include CR Gallery NY, Yossi Milo NY and M+B Gallery in Los Angeles.Group and collaborative exhibitions include 50 Paintings at the Milwaukee Art Museum organized by Michelle Grabner, Where I End, We Begin, at Suny SUNY purchase and LSU university with Mala Iqbal; Visionary New England, at the deCordova Museum, Paint, also known as Blood, Curated by Natalia Sielewicz, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland and Greater NY at PS1. She received a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, residencies at McDowell, Yaddo, and two fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown. She is department head and professor of painting at the Rhode Island school of design. Some of her teaching besides numerous lectures include being faculty at Skowhegan, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Anderson Ranch, and the Vermont Studio Center.