In a dimly lit performance space, a figure moved slowly under the weight of memory. They were dressed in layers of organza, and something that shimmered—not quite sequins, not quite stars. The piece was called In Between. It wasn’t a show so much as a shedding.
That figure was Gericault De La Rose.
To describe her is to stretch language: artist, educator, performance-maker, cultural worker, West Coast Overseer of the Kiki House of Moschino. But even these fall short. There’s something devotional in the way she crafts—installations built from folklore and flesh, sculptures that wink and wound, performances that are part liturgy, part ballroom.
“I’m a queer trans Filipinx woman,” she says, as if announcing a spell. “That is not a footnote. That is the work.”
Raised between here and the Philippines, disowned by her biological family, and reborn in community, Gericault’s practice is as much about reclamation as it is about survival. In her hands, pink becomes protest. Glitter becomes armor. A Manananggal—the terrifying, split-bodied vampire-woman of Philippine mythology—becomes a mirror.
“She’s beautiful,” Gericault says. “She flies. She’s feared. And she’s hollowed out from being told her body must do one thing to be real. I relate.”
A Space of Her Own
When she arrived at UC Berkeley’s MFA program, Gericault wasn’t looking for permission—she was looking for oxygen. “Grad school was a two-year artist residency, if we’re being honest,” she says with a laugh. “I learned how to apply for funding, how to document my work, how to write about it with teeth.”
The teeth matter.
Much of Gericault’s undergraduate experience had been shaped by the absence of people like her in art history books. “You’d get one class session on queer artists of color—if you were lucky,” she says. “The rest? Cis, white, male. Over and over.” She credits Cal’s interdisciplinary approach and mentorship from renowned artist Stephanie Syjuco with shifting that axis. “Studying with another Filipina artist? That changes something cellular.”
Protest in Pastel
In her most recent commission with the San Francisco Arts Commission, Gericault created a piece about gender-affirming surgery, body sovereignty, and the quiet violence of paperwork. The exhibition opened just as federal policies sought to erase trans people from government records.
“I couldn’t renew my passport with the correct gender marker,” she says. “So I put my body, my story, in a government-funded building. That was a protest. That was me saying: You do not get to erase me.”
The piece was tender and sharp. There were references to Catholicism—stained glass textures, votive arrangements—and echoes of Sailor Moon, her childhood portal into femininity. “That cartoon helped me see girlhood as something expansive, magical. To bring that into my work? That’s healing.”
Chosen Kin
When she speaks of her community, her voice softens. “Chicago gave me my politic. The Bay gave me my family.”
The first few months in Berkeley were quiet, almost too quiet. Until she saw a flyer—an indoor Ballroom session, eight minutes from her apartment. “That was the first time I got my 10s,” she says. “After that, everything changed.”
Now, Gericault is a leader in the Ballroom scene, performing, mentoring, showing up for others as they showed up for her. “They came to my art shows. They held me through surgeries. I went from zero family to dozens of brothers, sisters, parents.”
In this chosen lineage, love is a kind of infrastructure. Support is choreographed. And art? Art is always in motion.
Myth as Method
Her installations often reference pre-colonial Filipino symbolism. The Lingling-O, an amulet representing the union of feminine and masculine energy, appears again and again. “It reminds me that queerness is not new. Transness is not new. These binaries came with colonization.”
She makes work not just to document trauma, but to offer alternatives to it—“alternate endings,” she says, “where we don’t just survive, we shimmer.”
It’s a quiet revolution: joy as strategy, beauty as dissent. “I’m tired of only telling stories about pain,” she says. “I want to make things that sparkle, that flirt, that dance. I want to honor the parts of myself I wasn’t allowed to enjoy as a kid.”
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A Love Letter to the Next
When asked what she’d tell emerging queer artists of color at institutions like Cal, her answer is swift:
“Bleed the institution dry. Take everything. Make your own canon. You don’t need to appease a white audience to be great. You just need to be honest. And trust: the people who need your work will find it.”
There is no syllabus after you graduate, she reminds us. Only this: what you create, who you choose, what you carry forward, and what you let go.
Today, on June 5th, Gericault opens a new show at CounterPulse in San Francisco, a collaboration with fellow Filipinx artist Adrian Clutario. Like all her work, it refuses neat boxes. Like all her work, it is deeply alive.
For Gericault De La Rose, the art is not the object. The art is becoming.
