The Artist Who Dined Among Lions
California performance artist Bonnie Ora Sherk was a cultural trickster and proactive spoiler in the business of everyday life.
SANTA BARBARA — People didn’t always live in cities. It became more of the norm as asphalt and concrete covered dirt, and highways and overpasses became the infrastructure for commuting and delivering food and supplies. Bonnie Ora Sherk (1945–2021) spent four decades as an artist, landscape designer, and educator challenging the assumptions that underpin city life. Through her creative projects, Sherk consistently proposed new models of social relations. The retrospective Life Frames since 1970 at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Museum of Art, Design, and Architecture, is a well-designed, if modest, exhibition that highlights many of her interventions, from performances to interactive engagements, as documented in drawings, posters, photographs, and moving images.
Sherk began as a cultural trickster, like many conceptually based artists from the late 1950s onward, often acting as both observer and observed — and proactive spoiler — in the business of everyday life. After studying with Fluxus artists Robert Watts and Mel Henderson, Sherk applied a post-Dadaist performance sensibility to visionary yet practical rethinking of human priorities, promoting mindful encounters with other living creatures.
Because much of the exhibition is documentary, the aesthetics are somewhat limited, with occasional visual pleasures. Set in mundane outdoor locations in San Francisco, Sherk’s series Sitting Still (1970) — in which the artist places herself in ordinary chairs amid daily urban life — is presented in the exhibition through projections of large-scale Kodachrome photographs. Nearby, a black-and-white film transferred to video documents “Public Lunch” (1971), projecting Sherk caged in the San Francisco Zoo’s Lion House next to big cats in a neighboring lockup, as visitors gawked while both cats and the artist paced, napped, and were fed.
