Sophia Wallace is a Brooklyn-based conceptual artist and photographer. Through mixed media, images and video, her work looks at constructions of gender, race and sex. Her most recent work, CLITERACY, was a multimedia project that included street art, wearable art, sculpture, a "Clit Rodeo" and more. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien Museum, Art Basel Miami, Scope NY, Taschen Gallery and Aperture Gallery, among others.

On Friday, she'll be one of more than 25 artists "crashing" the Whitney Biennial in New York, in what they're calling a rogue feminist public intervention in protest of the museum's "tokenistic approach to diversity".

I got a chance to see Wallace's studio, to view CLITERACY and to talk with Wallace for my regular interview feature here about the change that has to happen in the mainstream art world.

JESSICA VALENTI: Tell me about CLITERACY.

SOPHIA WALLACE: CLITERACY is a mixed media series that explores a paradox – the global obsession with sexualizing female bodies in a world that is illiterate when it comes to female sexuality. The complete anatomy of the clitoris was only discovered 1998 and is almost universally unknown to this day. Female genitals are still considered taboo.

In everyday parlance, to speak of female genitals is impolite, if not shameful. CLITERACY covers a vast territory of information – including, but not limited to, scientific breakthroughs, psychoanalysis, female genital mutilation, architecture, religion, the myth of virginity, porn culture and semiotics. CLITERACY also utilizes humor – the Clit Rodeo performance being one example.

Can you show me one of your pieces?

When people think of female genitals, they think of small, they think of flowers. They don't think of it as a subject that is monumental. This piece is overwhelming and takes you inside yourself. There's an unspoken rule that if you talk about female subjectivity, you always see a body – so there's still objectification. We don't know how to think about female subjectivity without a body.

I want to connect these ideas of female bodies and genitals as sites of shame and violence and connect that with citizenship, and having pleasure. This idea – that we can fight for freedom from violence and reproductive justice without fighting for pleasure – is a fallacy.

I also like to re-appropriate language that's used by the Tea Party and the Minute Men, and use that language to talk about the clit - "don't tread on my clit".

Have you received any backlash?

The more direct backlash has been in the form of attacks in the comment sections of places my work is featured. I have received death threats as well. What has been more alarming for me is learning from multiple people that they can't open my emails or see my website because it flagged as pornographic.

What's the positive reaction to CLITERACY been like?

It has expanded in ways I never imagined, including people offering to translate CLITERACY, to install street art for me in Cairo, London and Melbourne. CLITERACY is appearing all over in the spaces women find that cannot be institutionally censored.

The latest is that, on a campus in Barcelona, people are writing the laws of CLITERACY on walls.

I want people to buy my art, obviously, but I want people to be able to use the art in the world to defend their bodies and their right to exist – to not just be a receptacle of shame and taboo.

It can't just be stuck in the white walls of the gallery, I want it to be part of the lexicon.

Part of the project is also about using the language of CLITERACY in everyday life, right?

Anyone can use the clitoral language. I was in the eye of the clit storm. I live in New York Clity. The Whitney Museum needs to grow a clit.

I read the piece about the action at the Whitney that you sent me. The writers took a quote from the Whitney's Biennial brochure – "We hope that our iteration of the Biennial will suggest the profoundly diverse and hybrid cultural identity of America today" – and "translated" it: "The 2014 Whitney Biennial is the whitest Biennial since 1993. Taking a cue from the corporate whitewashing of network television, high art embraces white supremacy under the rhetoric of multicultural necessity and diversity."

My hope is that our acts of civil disobedience will result in meaningful shifts of power. Until a significant number of positions of power are held by people of color, queers and women, "diversity" will be cosmetic. Institutions will boast of their multiculturalism in their marketing materials while allotting the most limited opportunities to marginal artists. A few get curated and somehow they are always placed in the small, tertiary spaces. We will have exhibitions where the only black woman in the exhibition makes dick paintings because she is actually a white man, and no-one will see the violence in this gesture. Because everyone thinks dick jokes are funny, right?

You're referring to "Donelle Woolford" – a white man representing himself as a black female artist?

One group of artists, Yams Collective, have pulled out of the show. They felt his inclusion negated their presence. They expressed their concern and the Whitney didn't listen. Nonparticipation is one of the most powerful ways one can intervene with institutions because you can't negotiate with them.

We are effectively locked out of museums and institutions. If you're not part of this elite pedigree of MFAs and dinner parties ... there's just so much space for dirty dealings. There was a show in 1993 that moved things forward, that was diverse. And now we've moved backwards.

Why is that, do you think?

There's a small group of people that have institutional power, and the decisions reflect their experiences and what makes them amused. Dick jokes resonate with a certain audience.

This is not about wanting literal numbers for equal representation - though it's that too. We want our creativity and contributions to be a part of the history of art. And that's for all of society.

What will you be doing in the intervention?

I created CLIT-Glass, a new technological intervention to address the phallic curatorial practices of the Whitney. Looking through CLIT-Glass places the clit back into the world, as form and subject. CLIT-Glass neutralizes this malady and can be used wherever needed – from the Museum, to board room, to the street, even in front of one's television. I'll be handing [them] out to create a neutral experience.

I will also be hosting a game "Put A CLIT on It". Participants will be given a CLIT to take selfies with as they CLITdazzle the Whitney. All who value meritocracy in the art world are invited to join me. #CLITdazzle #PutaCLITonit #CLITifytheWorld #CLITitstarted.

What do you want to work on next?

Right now, I am working full-time for the CLIT. I never expected the project to grow as much as it has but I can see it is far from over.

This [action at the Whitney], though, is the first action of many. I want to do something around white supremacy in a museum, because it's so overwhelming. The numbers of women and people of color that graduate from art school is so much higher than ever appear anywhere, and it's up to institutions to explain why it's only white men's work that they find merit in.

They are creating our present day history of what is the meaningful art of our time. Dick jokes? Are you fucking kidding me?