Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a public in a fine art context in an interdisciplinary mode. Also known as artistic action, it has been developed through the years as a genre of its own in which art is presented live. It had an important and fundamental role in 20th century avant-garde art.
José Luis Cuevas was a Mexican artist, he often worked as a painter, writer, draftsman, engraver, illustrator, and printmaker. Cuevas was one of the first to challenge the then dominant Mexican muralism movement as a prominent member of the Generación de la Ruptura. He was a mostly self-taught artist, whose styles and influences are moored to the darker side of life, often depicting distorted figures and the debasement of humanity. He had remained a controversial figure throughout his career, not only for his often shocking images, but also for his opposition to writers and artists who he feels participate in corruption or create only for money. In 1992, the José Luis Cuevas Museum was opened in the historic center of Mexico City holding most of his work and his personal art collection. His grandson Alexis de Chaunac is a contemporary artist.
Barbara Jean Hammer was an American feminist film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She is known for being one of the pioneers of the lesbian film genre, and her career spanned over 50 years. Hammer is known for having created experimental films dealing with women's issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships, coping with aging, and family life. She resided in New York City and Kerhonkson, New York, and taught each summer at the European Graduate School.
Jesse Lerner is a filmmaker and writer based in Los Angeles. His documentaries include Frontierland, about the Latino experience in the United States; Ruins, The Atomic Sublime, The Absent Stone and The American Egypt.
Peggy Ahwesh is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist. She received her B.F.A. at Antioch College. A bricoleur who has created both narrative works and documentaries, some projects are scripted and others incorporate improvised performance. She makes use of sync sound, found footage, digital animation, and Pixelvision video. Her work is primarily an investigation of cultural identity and the role of the subject in various genres. Her interests include genre; women, sexuality and feminism; reenactment; and artists' books. Her works have been shown worldwide, including in San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, London, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Créteil, France. Starting in 1990, she has taught at Bard College as a Professor of Film and Electronic Arts. Her teaching interests include: experimental media, history of the non-fiction film, and women in film.
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances. Working from a feminist perspective, Sachs weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
Antonia Eiriz Vázquez (1929–1995) was an influential Cuban painter whose work was known for its Expressionist qualities and was exhibited throughout Latin America during her life.
Nina Menkes is an independent filmmaker. Her films include The Great Sadness of Zohara (1983), Magdalena Viraga (1986), Queen of Diamonds (1991), The Bloody Child (1996), "Massacre (Massaker)" (2005), Phantom Love (2007), Dissolution (2010), and Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022). Dissolution (2010) was filmed in black and white and is set in Israel. Nina Menkes' sister Tinka appears as an actress in many of them. Menkes teaches at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, California. She has donated copies of several of her works to the Academy Film Archive.
Aïda Ruilova is an American contemporary artist.
Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker and producer. Her films explore the colliding identities of black immigrants in America through multiple forms ranging from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media. Interpreting the notion of "double consciousness," coined by sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, Owusu aims to create a third cinematic space or consciousness. In her work, feminism, queerness, and African identities interact in African, white American, and black American cultural spaces.
Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile.
Pola Maria Weiss Álvarez, also known as Pola Weiss, was widely recognized as the first pioneer of video art in Mexico. She is also remembered for her experimental videos in which she merged dance and video, becoming a pioneer in what is now known as screendance or videodanza (videodance). She also worked as a television producer and instructor of film, video, and television.
Kelly Sears is an American animator and filmmaker. In 2015 she lives in Los Angeles, California and is Assistant Professor of Film at University of Colorado Boulder. Her work consists of video, digital animation, stop-motion animation, digital imaging, and sound design.
Poli Marichal is a Puerto Rican artist living in Los Angeles, California who works in illustration, painting and filmmaking. She is the daughter of painter Carlos Marichal. Her works have consistently explored one of two themes: (1) social, political, and environmental concerns, and (2) introspection and emotions. She is also celebrated as one of the first experimental filmmakers in Puerto Rico, starting this pursuit in the mid-1980s. Marichal has also taught printmaking classes in New York City and California. Some of her awards include the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship and a New Works Grant from the Massachusetts Council for the Arts.
Carlota Eugenia Rosenfeld Villarreal, known as Lotty Rosenfeld, was an interdisciplinary artist based in Santiago, Chile. She was born in Santiago, Chile, and was active during the late 1970s during the time of the Chilean military coup d'état. She carried out public art interventions in urban areas, often manipulating traffic signs in order to challenge viewers to rethink notions of public space and political agency. Her work has been exhibited in several countries throughout Latin America, and Internationally in places such as Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Janet Toro is a performance artist based in Chile and Germany whose work has centered around an anti-establishment message and the illumination of the social injustices that resulted from the Pinochet dictatorship. She is most well known for her work, El cuerpo de la memoria, where she performed 90 actions over 44 days at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile. Shortly after this, she moved to Germany in 1999, where she continued her career as a performance artist before moving back to Chile in 2014.
Narcisa Hirsch is an Argentine experimental filmmaker of German birth. Her work centered on themes of the body, love, sex, death, movement, and the female gaze. Despite this focus on women, she has resisted being labeled as a feminist. She began as a painter, and but her later and better known work centers on performance and film, though she has also written several books. She cites Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel as influences to her experimental film work, as well as the Bauhaus artists of Germany. During her time as an experimental filmmaker in Argentina, she frequented the Di Tella Institute and the Goethe Institute, a place where many of her works premiered. Recently, her work has been honored through several retrospectives at international film festivals, though it was relatively unknown outside of exclusive circles when it first premiered. She won the Platinum Konex Award from Argentina in 2022.
Sarah Minter was a Mexican filmmaker and artist.
Margarita Morselli is an artist who is considered a pioneer in the use of a video as a form of artistic expression in Paraguay. The work she presented was on abstraction with references to real spaces.
Gloria Camiruaga was a Chilean videographer born in Santiago, whose art later became documentary in style. She was one of the first female videographers in Chile. Her work focused on the depiction of political corruption and social issues in Chile from the perspective of women. Her work was political, focusing on the political unrest in Chile such as the coup d'état of the 1970s. She has worked on numerous solo projects and with other artists in collaboration.
