Location: Throughout the museum
Registration is requested

In Act 1 of Velvet Rage, an experimental opera, attendees witness trench art in the making as artist Stephanie Mercedes and a group of queer metalworkers anneal and hammer one bullet into a bell. The “instruments”—forges, anvils, and power hammers—are the musical score for queer opera singers, percussionists, sound designers and dancers. This opera embodies the experience of duality: duality of gender, duality within a symbol, and duality within metal. This event will include a discussion and Q&A with the artist.

On Saturday, June 27, Mercedes will perform Act 2 of Velvet Rage at the Walters. In Act 2, queer opera singers, dancers, sound designers and percussionists will be scattered through the museum, hammering bullets into bells, using sounds and forms created in Act I and responding to the artist’s work commissioned by the Walters, We Were Treated Like Numbers Rather Than Stars (2025), now on view in the atrium of the Centre Street building.

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About the Artist

Stephanie Mercedes is an antidisciplinary queer Latine artist who works across sculpture, metal casting, opera, club music, choreography and sound. Their work revolves around creating rituals of mourning and rituals of liberation. Mercedes melts weapons to create instruments and sculptures. More recently they have used the sounds of destroying weapons as the score for their operatic work. They ask: How can metal be queer? Mercedes has exhibited and performed at the Bronx Museum, the Queens Museum, the Smithsonian, Art Museum of the Americas, and the Kennedy Center.