KIM HOPSON, PERFORMANCE ART

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LITTLE HAITI, NYC ⋆｡°✩ HUSTON, TX

The Sideshow of Everyday Miracles or Dinner & A Show

Kim Hopson is a multidisciplinary artist based in Houston, TX & Brooklyn, NY. She explores themes of disability, identity and ableism. Experiencing life with a limb difference has given her a unique viewpoint that is reflected in her work. She focuses on the body’s relationship to the world, both physically and emotionally. Motherhood has made that difference a more central part of her art, and her work has expanded to examine those experiences in the context of parenthood. Her intention is to create dialogue around these topics in order to spark a larger conversation.

The Sideshow of Everyday Miracles/ Dinner & A Show  is a ritualized, durational performance. I explore the overlapping performances demanded of the disabled mother, the caregiver, a woman whose body is both scrutinized and erased. I’m drawing on the history of the disabled entertainer and the theatricality of the sideshow tradition, reclaiming spectacle as a tool of agency and layered storytelling.

At the center of my piece is the artist herself: adorned in a handmade “Sideshow Mama” headdress and breastplate, festooned with symbolic accessories. Think tiny doll-babies, milk bottles, textiles of containment and care. Her body is a living altar, tethered with the tools of motherhood and disability in an exaggerated, ceremonial form.

Throughout the performance, I transform ordinary objects of parenting into objects of reverence and uncanny ritual. The actions are slow, delivered with real intention: warming a bottle becomes a rite, soothing with a toy becomes a spell. These actions unfold within a central tableau that references both the daisy-like spread of limbs from vintage freak show posters and the emotional overstretch of the caregiving body. Each “petal” is another expectation. Each extension of the body asks: how many roles can one perform at once, and at what cost?

Projected or narrated stories accompany the piece. These are testimonies of mothering while disabled, of navigating daily life as spectacle, of the conflict between hypervisibility and invisibility. I’m inspired by historical accounts of disabled performers who led audiences through emotional journeys rather than relying solely on physical differences, as I will be guiding the viewer through their own layered identity. This won’t explain, it’ll reveal.

The audience is invited not just to witness, but to notice. The “show” is not fiction, it is what already exists, simply heightened. Society demands the performance, but refuses to acknowledge it as performance. This piece will insist on that recognition.

All the best,

Kim