Kellie Jones on the Rise of Performance Art in the 1970s

Kellie Jones (2018) (photo courtesy and © Rod McGaha)

Beginning in the late 1960s, the rise of performance art coincided with various progressive movements for equality and liberation. Operating outside of a commercial, market-based system granted practitioners of performance art a certain freedom to explore issues surrounding race, gender, class, social inequality, and political corruption. This was true not only in the US, but around the world as well.

Kellie Jones, author of South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, will discuss the role that performance played in the work of Latin American and African American artists in her upcoming lecture “Signs of Life: Aspects of Global Performance in the 1970s.” Some of the artists Jones will discuss include the Argentine artist David Lamelas, whose 1978 film The Dictator parodies corrupt Latin American rulers, and Mexican artists Felipe Ehrenberg — who fled his home country for England after the student massacre of 1968 — and Lourdes Grobet, both of whom were members of the subversive art collective, Grupo Proceso Pentágono. Jones will also focus on African American artists like Senga Nengudi, who used soft sculptures as vehicles for choreographed movements, and Adrian Piper, whose public performances involved and implicated a general audience beyond the walls of the white cube. The event is free, but tickets are required.