Linda Montano
| Linda Montano | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Linda Mary Montano January 18, 1942 Saugerties, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Education |
College of New Rochelle Maryknoll Sisters (novice) University of Wisconsin (sculpture) |
| Known for | performance art |
| Awards | ARTIES Award, 1st Annual Performance Art Award, Franklin Furnace (1986) Susan B. Anthony Award, Window for Peace (February 1988) Bessie Award for Innovative Artists (Seven Years of Living Art, 1992) Best Performance Artist (Chronogram, 2000) |
Linda Mary Montano (born January 18, 1942, Saugerties, New York) is an American performance artist.
She was raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic household, partly Irish and partly Italian, that was surrounded by artistic activity. Both her parents played in an orchestra but Linda's fascination with Catholic ritual and desire to do humanitarian service led her to join the novitiate of the Maryknoll Sisters after one year studying at the College of New Rochelle. After two years with the order, however, Montano was suffering from severe anorexia, weighing only 80 pounds (36 kg), and she left the order to return to her former college, from which she graduated in 1965 as a sculptor.
During the rest of the 1960s, Montano continued to study and began performing, and by 1971 she was devoting herself exclusively to performance art. Around this time she married the photographer Mitchell Payne. During this period, Montano drifted away from the Catholic Church, but despite this loss of faith, she consistently acknowledged the influence of her strict Catholic upbringing on her work - for instance in how the discipline of convent life and her family's loyal work-ethic made her able to carry out extremely disciplined performances in her later career. Montano's first major performance, Chicken Woman (1972) was based on her MFA sculpture show at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. There she exhibited nine live chickens in three 8-foot (2.4 m) by 16-foot-long (4.9 m) minimalist chicken wire cages on the roof of the art building. It was titled "The Chicken Show" from 1969.
Montano moved to San Francisco 1970 with her husband,. There she established herself with performances like "Handcuff" (1973 with Tom Marioni) where she was physically tied to other artists, and "Three Day Blindfold" (1974), where she lived for three days blindfolded and had to find her way around. The death of her husband led to further exploration of art as a healing modality ("Mitchells' Death", 1978) and she continued her art-theology dialogue by living in a Zen monastery for three years and to Ananda Ashram in the 1980s where she studied with Dr. Ramamurti Mishra for over 30 years. His influence and appreciation of her vision encouraged both her art and life. Upon meeting Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh, they performed a collaboration whereby the two artists were bound to each other by a length of rope 24 hours a day for a whole year (from July 4, 1983 to July 3, 1984). During the late 1980s Montano began teaching Sacred Sex workshops with Annie Sprinkle and Barbara Carrellas with whom she also created MetamorphoSex (later changed to The Art of Love at Montano's suggestion), a "workshop, sex magic ritual and theatre performance rolled into one" which was first performed in Texas in 1995.
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