“Happy 10th Birthday, Peacock Racer! (Baby X Turns 10)” was a live birthday party performance to celebrate the tenth birthday of my son Ajax Kotak Bell, who I gave birth to on October 25, 2011 at Microscope Gallery’s original Bushwick location at 4 Charles Place, as part of the exhibition “The Birth of Baby X.” This event culminated a decade in a series of ten annual birthday party performances as part of my wider “Raising Baby X” project, which highlights the unseen and uncelebrated labor of raising a child, and re-contextualizes it as performance art. For the “Happy 10th Birthday…”, I invited family, friends, and the general public to join myself and Ajax for the birthday festivities, which included elaborate tracks for Hot Wheels cars designed by Ajax, a peacock balloon arch installation, vegan peacock cupcakes, and a Halloween piñata. Ajax was dressed as “The Peacock King,” in a costume that he made for himself from cardboard, paper mache, feathers, and fabric. I was dressed as pea-hen with my own hand-made costume. During the event, which lasted about three hours, guests, dressed in costume, designed and played with Hot Wheels tracks that wrapped around the front courtyard of my building. The party was held outdoors in front of our Bushwick home to make accommodations for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which was experiencing the onset of the Delta variant.

I view the birthday party as quintessential in the rituals celebrating daily life, and wish to elevate these common practices to the level of high art. “Raising Baby X” is central to my wider body of work, considering everyday life as art and its rituals, accomplishments and achievements as personal triumphs to be shared and celebrated. The long-term project has evolved in recent years to a collaboration between mother and son.