We recently connected with Red Rae and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Red thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
Paradise Portals at Area 405 in Baltimore, MD.
“Paradise Portals” is a multimedia performance series that uses movement, drone footage, livestream video, and green screen technology to create portals between artists’ bodies and environments that hold significance for them. This project explores both the visibility and removal of people, histories, and bodies from the spaces we occupy. A portal is an opening to an alternate reality, an opening that you can choose to step through, or choose to stay away from. By bravely choosing to open the portal we both expose and erase the body and superimpose both history and fantasy into the spaces in “between”. In doing so, the project shows that every one of us is a portal. A portal to our past, our thoughts, the unknown, our potential, our liberation, our stories, and much more. It asks, “who are you really?”.
As a person with a trans body, I explore the potentiality that is transness in American culture, and will create a space where bodies oppressed by white supremacist patriarchy no longer have to be portals for others’ projections. Each performer is a portal to their own destiny and a portal to their own past. Through the use of technology and dynamic performance, four actors take the audience on a journey through their personal portals, into their memories, true and fantastic. “Paradise Portal” transports audiences to other worlds, inviting them to see their own bodies and environments with new eyes.
you can read more here:
https://bmoreart.com/2025/06/personal-political-poignant-paradise-portals.html
here:
https://www.adamgrossi.com/phenomenal-conveyance/the-realms-of-red
and forthcoming :
https://howlround.com
Red, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Red Rae (Rae Hample) they/them, is a multimedia performer and teacher, and runs a community art and organizing space out of their home in Baltimore, MD. They imbue their projects with playful sincerity while examining ideas of perception and transformation, often through the lens of trans futurity. They use movement, technology, animation, and poetry to explore many subjects having to do with metamorphosis and queer potential. Red is originally from Albuquerque, NM where they developed their love of live performance, and nature with its queer, sexy, and violent rhythms. Red has performed all over the country in too many spaces to name, including Murmurs LA, Mana Contemporary Chicago, Vox Populi, The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, WOW Theater in New York City and the Museum of Human Achievement. They have been awarded numerous grants and residencies and were recently an artist in residence at both the MacDowell Colony and the Studios at Mass MoCA, they were a 2023 a Sondheim Prize semi finalist and a 2024 Rubys Grantee. They hold a MFA from Towson University and a BA from Bard College. They are obsessing over portals right now.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
I make my work when I have funding and I make my work when I don’t.
There are many ways to measure success outside of business frameworks. I’m interested in the ways in which my work evokes emotion and touches others hearts and minds. That happens both at times when I have funding and at times when I don’t. That being said, I am amazed at how having even minimal arts funding enables artist to dream bigger and touch more people. The products we offer as artists are different and harder to measure than profits and margins but they have no less value (and have much larger cultural currency).
Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?
I wish I’d known there are free grant writing for artists workshops. I took my first one in 2020 with a wonderful organization called Artists U.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://redrae.net
- Instagram: @red.rae.red
Image Credits
Jessye Grieves Carlson, Oliver Maddox, Re Orr and Joyce Lanxin Zhao