Over the past 15 years, American artist Sharon Hayes has been probing how speech—both public and private—intersects with politics, history, personal identity, desire, and love through her performances and multimedia installations. Drawing on a range of artistic and academic practices, her approach is arguably most clearly defined by the New York theater scene that greeted her as an undergraduate student in the early 1990s—staunchly political, feminist, queer-identified, and besieged by the AIDS crisis. It is through this specific temporal and geographic lens that Hayes developed her artistic voice, one with which she has tackled a diversity of issues and topics including the 1968 Democratic Convention, Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.