Alternative Art on Hennepin with Venus DeMars

As part of the exhibit Art on Hennepin, which is featured in the Jack Links Legend Lounge in The Hennepin until January 7, 2024, I had the opportunity to speak with Venus DeMars, an artist, musician and leader in the LGBTQIA+ community who saw the height of the alternative art scene on Hennepin Avenue in the 1980s.

Hey Venus. Thank you for joining us today. Could you introduce yourself and give a bit of your background of your role in the art scene of Hennepin back in the day?

Okay; I’m Venus de Mars, I went by my dead name earlier on, and I began working in the downtown art scene back in the ‘80s through Rifle Sport Alternative Art Gallery. I was one of the main artists for that gallery and I stayed with them through their relocation across Loring Park before they ultimately closed. I also did the little offshoot things that Rifle Sport put together; one of the interns at the time, Chris Strouth, who is now much better known for a variety of promotional music and event type things, but back then as a teen he interned with us and had the idea of doing Rifle Sport on the road.

Chris was in charge of putting things together in alternative spaces. He once had an installation space for Rifle Sport at the Uptown Theater, this old movie theater, and I took advantage of that. I did a piece where we treated the whole second floor with my kinetic, moving sculptures. I had this huge stick figure that I made, almost 30 feet in length, and hung it over the concession stand. It moved back and forth through the whole exhibit. I had that and my paintings on all the walls and I covered the whole second floor in black plastic. It took me almost two weeks of setup before opening night.

I did another installation at Fridley in a mall that we created installations all around in. I still have some of the original parts to the one I created, The Beast watches TV. It was a wood and canvas structured beast that I've modeled after the beasts on the cover art of my album Animal Angst; that kind of pointy-stylized, four-legged animal. I got criticized for being a Satan worshipper, there were protests and it was a big deal. This was around 1986 or ’87, so towards the end of the Satanic Panic.

Where did you get the name, Rifle Sport Alternative Art Gallery?

Back in the day, along Hennepin, artists rented all the second-floor apartments, and Rifle Sport was one of those spaces. It used to be a shooting gallery, like a BB gun arcade that was called Rifle Sport. When the artists moved in, we kept the name but turned it into this alternative art gallery—all secret and clandestine.

I painted the iconic big blue doors out front—we didn't get permission to do it. I got up really, really, really, really early—predawn, even—and would drive downtown and set up my ladders. I whitewashed the whole thing. Then by noon, people were coming out of the bars, shaking my ladder and shouting and laughing. It was like I couldn't work past noon. And then also by then, the police were coming out to take a look around and keep track of everything, so I had to shut down shop then. Completely clandestine, we didn’t have permission to paint the storefront. But we got it all done. That’s how we got the iconic crosshair above the door—twenty feet up with a three-foot overhang at the top, not to mention. Really made me nervous whenever I had to go all the way up.

What was the art scene like while you were at Rifle Sport?

The art scene was extremely vibrant, yeah. Amazingly so. Hennepin Avenue had a Shinder’s on either side, then all the bars and different things all the way up and down, and all the small businesses with the second-floor apartments. People were turning their studios into galleries, so there are a lot of pop-up galleries that would open. We hung out at Rifle Sport, then when we got kind of bored, we’d go and walk through all the little galleries. Once a month they would have an art crawl and galleries everywhere would open up their doors. The Wyman building had like ten galleries. Six-hundred or so people would come down and just wander. You’d get food and alcohol and people would just walk around. It was like a huge street party. People just wandering on the sidewalks and then going into all the little studios and looking at the art. There were serious collectors at that time that were buying art for like $1000 or more. So that's what we were all hoping for.

Rifle Sport had become pretty big, the main gallery for part of that scene. At Rifle Sport, we had a magazine and a calendar of exhibits that we would put out and we would have artists contribute and that would get other people to come and donate to us.

We would do music too; we would have bands on occasion. Art rock was the thing back then, Talking Heads kind of set that stage. That was the type of bands that we had—we didn't do regular bands, they had to be an performance art band of some sort.

What was it like having so many creatives in one space?

It felt vibrant. It felt so empowering. It felt like this was the New York of Minnesota. It just felt like all things were possible. Because the collectors were coming and buying things for a huge amount of money, the grunge music scene was taking off and Minneapolis was a hot spot of music, so bands were getting signed and getting famous. It was an extremely exciting time to be in Minneapolis because you felt like you could use it as a way to move into an international scene. It felt like a launching pad for a major career in the art world. It's not so much anymore.

How do you feel about the current art scene?

It's very commercial. In my opinion, nothing really edgy is coming out of the galleries these days. If they do something edgy, it's mildly edgy. I had so many things shut down because mine truly was edgy. There are still small alternative spaces that are trying to do it, to push boundaries, but I think it's mostly music now that's pushing them.

Outside of a small, intimate scale, artists aren’t challenging norms because they don't want to alienate an audience. There’s so much strife right now that people are afraid to make a difference because in this capitalist system, if you alienate the people who might buy your artwork, you can't make rent. So, you have to be independently wealthy and how many of us are?

So the art scene here, again in my opinion, pales compared to what it was. It’s unfortunate there are so many dead DIY art galleries out there, and people can’t afford to be risk takers taking on bold and challenging works in ways that people hadn't seen before—it just doesn't happen anymore.

But the music scene right now, I mean, that’s what is really vibrant, I think, and it has diversified a lot. I think there's a lot more opportunity for people from all different backgrounds to work musically. Everybody has software at home now, so everybody can be a producer, and everybody can do their own recording and they can put out professional work without going to a recording studio. That's a good thing. Some of the underground punk scenes are where you still get a lot of that raw energy and new ideas.

Did your identity play a large role in your art?

Yeah. Had I not transitioned, I think I probably could have established a whole other career, a completely different lifepath. Most of my work are trans figures. For a large part of my life I’ve played with gender, even before I came out. It satisfied my old inner dysphoria, but it was just an early attempt at trying to find balance in my life.

Ultimately, it didn’t work, so in 1988, with the help of a therapist, I came out. During that time, I started creating artwork which reflected my trends, and I started doing my iconic paintings of the blue figure. That figure is sort of based on this ambiguous dream I had that represented me emotionally—it’s an emotional portrait in a type of way. And they were also trans. I lived a nonbinary life at that point; I had started hormone therapy and developed breasts, but I still had my male genitals, so I had this dualistic body and I reflected that in my blue figures.

But, because there was a penis in my paintings, I couldn’t show them anywhere. Whenever I tried to show them, they would be shut down or the show runners would try to censor my work. So I had to find some alternate spaces—this is after Rifle Sport. When I was trying to find other galleries, I got lots of support and people liked my work, but I could not get any official gallery to take me on, so I started doing alternate spaces. I would layout a book which you would write comments in and I got threats I got I had arguments back and forth. People who were all about what I was doing and people who were all against it and they'd be arguing back and forth on paper. It was insane, very, very controversial, but it was before the Internet, before social media, so it was all within that, that realm of the comment books.

And I did a number of those shows, but they kept getting in trouble. They kept getting shut down and eventually I just got so sick of it that I quit doing visual art in any official way. I kept doing it on my own. That's where the drawing started, and I started just doing that on my own. And I concentrated more on performance art, where I did have more freedom on the stage. I started doing performance work at the Southern Theater at the Walker Soap Factory.

You began your transition in 1988, that is way ahead of the times—even now it’s hard to get that sort of treatment. Will you tell me a little bit about that journey?

I was kind of living life in a way of just of a survival mode. I wasn't thinking about anything other than just trying to make some sort of bubble around me. Which would protect me. And so for me, that was the art world, cause I could build that bubble on stage and I could do it on a rock'n'roll stage, too. And I could do it in the art galleries. I could build a bubble—but it wasn't impenetrable. I did have to deal with people that did not like what I did, and they would challenge me sometimes. Pretty aggressively, but I still felt protection and I felt like I had somebody there who was going to have my back.

But you have to understand, back at that time there was no option to transition that no insurance would pay for anything. There were just a handful of people in the States that could help, and you had to know who to talk to and how to get there and how to get through all the red tape. Or you went overseas, and that cost an immense amount of money.

There was no insurance coverage at all, so only the people who were independently wealthy or were in a relationship with someone who was could afford to transition. It was just impossible. I still don't know how I made it onto the short list of people who could successfully transition. But I was, I just was. I just pushed myself into the right circumstances by being a pest. There was a clinic that I bothered until I finally got one doctor who was willing to talk to me and he believed me. And he helped me talk to an endocrinologist, and I had to self-advocate for myself all over again. The biggest stumbling block was that I was married, because it would have been illegal to stay married if I transitioned. Oh, so I we would have had to get a divorce and [the doctors] were deathly afraid of lawsuits because I had nobody in the medical field advocating for me. It ended up that it was purely the kindness of one doctor that allowed me to get hormone treatment.

And transitioning is serious business, isn't it? It’s hard to do without proper advocacy.

Oh yeah. I got impatient cause they started me off with a really low dose and that peaked after a while. So, I went online and that was the Internet back then, which was kind of the Dark Web. No rules, completely unregulated. I found a group for transsexuals at that time of and they had an address for a pharmacy in Greece that was selling hormones. I put fifty bucks in an envelope, wrote a letter and I decided that I could lose it. It was worth it for the chance to get hormones. And I got the hormones back, so I did that three more times. And it was like the highest, highest hormones, you could take. I thought it was great, I did the extra on top of what I was officially taking, then I will get the transition stage that I need, and then I'll go back to my regular dose and nobody will know. And within about a month and a half, I had shut my liver down.

I didn't know what had happened, so I kept taking them. I made a doctor's appointment and my doctor said, yeah, we ran the test for hepatitis A and B, but both of them came back negative. And he said you have hepatitis C. And we don't know what that is and it's chronic and we have to stop everything to not tax your liver and. And that meant my official hormone treatment was gone. Everything is gone. And I was still too afraid to confess that I had gotten these underground hormones. It took a week before I finally realized I was not going to live unless I confessed what I did.

When you stop hormone treatment, there's a couple of things that happen. Firstly, I had damaged my liver. Shut it down completely. I was completely cold white. My eyes were cold. My shit was white. I itched everywhere. My liver did not work at all. Nobody knew if it would come back. Second thing is, if you stop hormone treatment (this is for trans women) if your body is still creating natural testosterone and you stop taking the extra estrogen, your body is like, oh, what the hell? Finally. And it kicks out testosterone over time. And back then, we didn’t have the testosterone suppressants like we do now, so all of the things that you've been suppressing through extra estrogen starts working overtime. You basically have another male puberty that that takes over. You so while you worked outside the lines to get ahead, this second puberty sets you back.

It's pretty nasty and that's why they do the suppressants now to avoid that from happening. It took a long time to convince my doctor I was ready to start treatment again. Luckily, after my liver did recover and I did confess, which he wasn't happy about at all, he eventually agreed to let me go back on hormone treatment.

I was so lucky to have a doctor actually trying to keep me healthy without really knowing anything about it himself. He was learning along with me, so with the new hormone treatment he was just trying to keep my liver from shutting down again. That’s all he was concerned about. And then and then the side effect of that was that I got high blood pressure from it and then there was a whole thing about trying to keep my blood pressure down. We didn't have a lot of treatments for blood pressure back then, which made it hard for me to work as a performance artist, since all the treatments then were all about restricting the heartbeat, and I couldn't go onstage. I got too exhausted. Ultimately, I lived with extremely high blood pressure for decades, and that eventually gave me a heart attack in 2012. Then in 2013, I was fighting a tax audit thing and I was under a great deal of stress and my bad cholesterol was kicking up and it eventually clogged my heart. Luckily, the last one happened in the hospital, and they scheduled me to put stents in my heart the next day.

This sounds like a strenuous journey to make alone. Were you able to find a support network through it?

My therapist helped me quite a bit; he provided a safe space and some testing when the subject first came up and I felt that I could admit that. But at the time, it was still classified as a mental illness, so even though he was thrilled that we had that breakthrough, and I was able to come out, he legally had to quit giving me therapy, since he would have been encouraging a mental illness and that was illegal. I believe he was from the [LGBTQIA+] community, though—he was gay, but he couldn’t tell me that either because he’d lose his job. It was dark days back then.

But because of his place in the community, he was able to connect me with a crossing club. Independent of any official thing, just a grassroots place where people who were trans found each other and organized. We had little, clandestine monthly meetings where you could be yourself in a very closed and secret way.

Film was part of that too. I did a documentary with the transgender community in the ‘90s. People from across the gender spectrum at various stages of transition. I’m trying to revise that now because then, there was no community. There were just all of us individuals trying to figure out who the hell we were and why we felt the way we did—I did that documentary in order to find community. That’s how I began to make friends and to look to people who were exhibiting some other type of gender expression than the normative societal expectations, and I used the documentary as a vehicle to find out their stories and make those connections to a community.

Have you ever thought of reviving those efforts? Finishing the documentary?

Yeah, most of the people I spoke to are still alive. I even reconnected with one of the psychiatrists who I interviewed recently. It was a time when the term transgender was just beginning. Just beginning. And there was a debate about what it meant, whether it meant going from one gender to the other, or transcending gender. There were a few different ideas about what it meant. And I decided to use it as an umbrella term. So that's what I was pursuing when I used it. It was such early days.

But at the time, no one would take the documentary. PBS entertained the idea for a moment, but days before it was set to air, the producers pulled it. Too controversial. But maybe today’s networks are ready for it.

What is legacy that you hope that you left on Hennepin?

Oh my gosh legacy. We all hope to leave something, you know, but I'm still working. I'm still trying to create. I'm still trying to do something new and challenging and I'm still trying to change the world. That doesn't stop. So, to think about a legacy, I think what I am trying to do now might be to help open some doors open some minds to consider other people. I'm thinking of the trans community. And I guess my work now is trying to keep that door open, trying to keep it from closing. Cause this? [Venus gestured at herself] People are trying to close it now. So, it's an ongoing legacy perhaps.

You know, we were young when we started Rifle Sport, in our 20s. Chris was a teenager. We were kids. You know when you're a kid, you feel immortal. You feel like you can do anything. You can make a difference. You feel inspired. All possibilities are there in front of you, you just have to figure out what button to push. What door to go through. You know where to turn left, where to turn right. What alley to go down. Life is a puzzle, and if you play it right, you win. That’s the way you think back then, but as you get older now, you know, I don't see so much of that puzzle in front of me. I still enjoy the puzzle, but I also see the end of the game coming so. And I haven't won yet, so I'm still trying different doors and different buttons and different angles, but I haven’t figured out the game. Yet.