LINDA MARY MONTANO 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. Linda’s fascination with Catholic ritual and desire to do humanitarian are reflected in her work. Her work investigates the relationship between art and life through intricate, life-altering ceremonies, some of which last for seven or more years. She is interested in the way artistic ritual, often staged as individual interactions or collaborative workshops, can be used to alter and enhance a person’s life and to create the opportunity for focus on spiritual energy states, silence and the cessation of art/life boundaries.

Montano has lived performance, endured as performance, taught performance , written about performance and videotaped as performance. She has been "being Paul " for many years and she is also, Mother Theresa, Hillary Clinton and Bob Dylan sometimes.

PAUL McMAHON is one of the legendary Bards of Woodstock, NY, where he performs; composes music; heals; officiates at his Sunday Church; gives food, care and shelter to his twin daughters and appears at Woodstock and NYC venues as THE ROCK AND ROLL THERAPIST. McMahon, a love guru, is real!

For this Glandathon performance, Linda and Paul will sing thanks to the seven glands of the body. Montano will lip-synch, as Paul sings his songs. They offer this performance in memory of performance artists Chris Burden and Rachel Rosenthal.

Martha Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past four decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. She began making these videos and photo/text works in the early 1970s while in Halifax in Nova Scotia, and further developed her performative and video-based practice after moving in 1974 to New York City, embarking on a long career that would see her gain attention across the U.S. for her provocative appearances and works. In 1976 she also founded and continues to direct Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion and preservation of artists’ books, installation art, video, onliine and performance art, further challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within society, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums.

As a performance artist she founded and collaborated with DISBAND, the all-girl punk conceptual band of women artists who can’t play any instruments, and impersonated political figures such as Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and Tipper Gore. In 2008 she had her first solo exhibition in New York at Mitchell Algus Gallery, “Martha Wilson: Photo/Text Works, 1971-74.” In 2009, “Martha Wilson: Staging the Self,” an exhibition of Ms. Wilson’s early photo/text work and one project from each of Franklin Furnace’s first 30 years, began international travel under the auspices of ICI (Independent Curators International); and in 2011, ICI published the Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces. Martha Wilson joined P.P.O.W Gallery, New York, and mounted a solo exhibition, “I have become my own worst fear,” in September, 2011.

Whitney V. Hunter works in performance, exhibition, curation, and education and is based in NYC. He creates and curates for the stage, gallery, and alternative spaces, and directs his performance-theater collective Whitney Hunter[MEDIUM]. His works have been presented at La Mama, Grace Exhibition Space, through Panoply Performance Laboratory, Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, Itinerant Festival and the Lumen Festival. He has performed with the Martha Graham Dance Company, Reggie Wilson Fist and Heel Performance Group, Rioult Dance, Irish Modern Dance Theatre, and in the works of John Jesurun, Fiona Templeton, Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik, and Martha Clarke. Whitney is a Movement Research Artist in Residence (2013-15), a founding member of Social Health Performance Club, and presently a David Driskell Ph.D. Fellow at Institute for the Doctoral Studies in the Visual Art.

Thomas Albrecht’s performance projects have explored ritual and language in public spaces, galleries, and museums, prodding cultural beliefs and individual doubts. Current interests involve duration and elements of Absurdist Theatre, laying bare contingency in human constructions and slippage between truth and fiction. Albrecht has performed throughout the United States and in Europe, notably at Grace Exhibition Space, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Dimanche Rouge Paris, and during festivals such as the Brooklyn International Performing Arts Festival and Month of Performance Art Berlin. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, a Master of Arts in Religion from Yale University where he served as the Menil Scholar in residence, and his MFA from the University of Washington. He serves as Associate Professor in the Art Department at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Thomas Albrecht: www.thomasalbrecht.com

 AYANA EVANS

Ayana Evans is a NYC based artist. She frequently visits her hometown of Chicago whose Midwestern and sometimes controversial reputation is a major influence on her art. Evans received her MFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and her BA in Visual Arts from Brown University. She has attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and the Vermont Studio Center. In 2014 she co-founded and began curatorial work with Social Health Performance Club. Evans’s recent performances include: "Operation Catsuit," which is an on-going public intervention, "He Loves Me Not," Local Project, LIC, “Frying Chicken,” a video collaboration with David Ian Griess, and “Happy Burfday Robert,” Panoply Performance Laboratory, Brooklyn. Additionally, Evans is an artist contributor for Gallerina Diaries and an active member of the fashion community via her handbag line YANA Handbags

Ayana Evans: www.ayanaevans.com

MYK HENRY

Myk Henry was born in Dublin, Ireland and moved to New York in 1984. From 1989-1992 he became a key figure in the organization of several large scale warehouse art events along the Brooklyn waterfront. In 1994 he moved to Geneva, Switzerland where he graduated in 2001 with both a BFA and MFA at Ecole Superieure des Arts Visuels. Henry works with new media installation, sound sculpture, video and performance. As a performer he exploits the audience’s sense of awareness and engages them in a transformative process. Investigating the thin divide between private and public space, his work is provocative, edgy and slams the viewer into the centre of political issues, social conditioning and human taboos.
Culture Ireland regularly provides Henry with funding, which enables him to build sculptures and make performances at many well known venues and festivals around the world. He has shown work at ARCO in Madrid, UNHCR in Geneva, the Museum of Art and History in Geneva, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, the World Expo in Shanghai, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Vaasa (Finland), Fountain, Miami Basel and the Armory Show in New York. He won "La Bourse Federal", (Young Art Basel, Switzerland), Le prix Contonal Geneva (Switzerland) and was the first foreigner to win Le Prix Providencia, (Swizerland).

Myk Henry: www.mykhenry.com 

Chun Hua Catherine Dong is a Chinese-born artist working with prformance art, photography, and video. She received a B.F.A from Emily Carr University Art & Design and a M.F.A. from Concordia University in Canada. She has performed in multiple national and international performance art festivals and venues, such as Dublin Live Art Festival, Infr’Action Venice, ENCUENTRO 2014, Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania, INTERNATIONALES FESTIVAL FÜR PERFORMANCE in Mannheim, Place des Arts in Montreal, M: ST Performance Festival in Calgary, Visualeyez Performance Festival in Edmonton, and so on. She will be performing at Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival in Chicago and The Great American Performance Art in New York in 2015.

She has exhibited her works in Boston, Delhi, Dublin, Helsinki, Turin, Tornio, Toronto, Venice, Montreal and Vancouver. Her performance documentation was screened at over 25 events in 19 countries in 2014. Among many other awards, she is the recipient of the prestigious Franklin Furnace Award for avant-garde art in New York in 2014. Her performance is listed amongst the ‘‘Top Nine Political Art Projects of 2010’’ by Art and Threat Canadian magazine.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong: www.chunhuacatherinedong.wordpress.com/

TSEDAYE MAKONNEN

Tsedaye is a first-generation Ethiopian American performance artist, ceramicist and sculptor based out of the DC area. Her work gravitates towards melodies that have played the loudest in her life: rituals, colorism, immigration, barriers, assimilation, soul & ancestral connections and so on; while using materials and her body to unveil then entwine them. photo by: Tony Hitchcock

Tsedaye Makonnen: www.facebook.com/tsedaye

Diane Dwyer was born in Japan, and grew up in New England. She lives in Brooklyn, where she host projects and events in her apartment including Diane’s Circus and Cloying Parlor. Much of her performance work consists of interventions and private actions, viewed primarily through documentation, if at all.

Diane’s work has been screened in Bulgaria, Cuba, England, Ireland, Montenegro, Russia, and Venezuela. In the USA, she has been included in new genres festivals and exhibitions in Atlanta, Baltimore, DC, Las Vegas, and New York. She received her BFA from The Museum School/Tufts University and her MFA from the University of Connecticut, where she was awarded a teaching fellowship. Teaching is an important aspect of her life as an artist. She is currently a part-time assistant professor at Parsons the New School for Design.

Alexis Penney is an artist, practicing witch, Aquarius and yogi from Lenexa, KS, based in Brooklyn, NY, where he lives and works with the art and performance collective Chez Deep. Penney's work occurs as a holistic and interconnected ecology of interdisciplinary practices (his most recent cycle, entitled Window, included a full length memoir with photography, a full-length musical record and readings, lectures, concerts and several collaborative audio visual documents). A self-identified stoner, drag priestess, dissident and lunatic, Penney seeks to embody and describe new possibilities within the psychocultural and spiritual fabric of life, art and identity based on a cosmology of interconnectedness and sanctity of all.

Diane Dwyer: www.dianedwyer.info/

ABOUT THE GREAT AMERICAN PERFORMANCE ART FESTIVAL

What does it mean to be American? American in the sense of what it is to be living, working, and creating in the Americas: a broad and fluid definition of this hemispheric region and the people who identify with it—people of first nations, South/Central/North America, Canada, the Caribbean. The Great American Performance Art Festival is a series of performance art events curated around this question and its implications, most specifically the notion of borders and barriers. Borders are an arbitrary social construct reminiscent of colonization, war, and exploitation. The population of the Americas has grappled with issues regarding borders and migration, and barriers such as those between languages, political ideologies, religious beliefs, identities, races, ethnicities, demographics, privileges, communities, individuals, governing and law enforcement bodies, and countless other tensions that arise as a part of living in, working in, and identifying with the Americas.

Grace Exhibition Space Brooklyn and this horizontally organized group of curators and artists invited erformance art pieces that respond to the problematics of borders and barriers within the Americas. We seeked proposals for embodied art that reinterpret and reimagine the diverse social, cultural, and economic landscape of the Americas. We encourage proposals for pieces that extend to include broad cross-sections of communities and demographics, and especially those which include participatory elements that address the natural performative barrier between artist and audience. The Great American Performance Art Festival welcomes any interpretation, however abstract, of its proposed theme.

The Great American Performance Art Festival will take place from March-August 2015. Events will be held every other weekend at Grace Exhibition Space for March-May, and every other weekend at the Grace Performance Art Farm in Rosendale, NY from June-August. We will curate roughly 4-5 artists per event.

ABOUT GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE

Grace Exhibition Space opened in 2006 and is devoted exclusively to Performance Art. We offer an opportunity to experience visceral and challenging performance works by the current generation of international performance artists, whether emerging, mid career or established. Being a Brooklyn loft, our events are presented on the floor, not on a stage, dissolving the boundary between artist and viewer. Grace Exhibition Space is run by Jill & Erik with Vincent Tiley. Jamie is our bartender and Leah runs the door.

Please also support PANOPLY PERFORMANCE LAB [Brooklyn] GLASSHOUSE GALLERY [Brooklyn], MOBIUS [Boston] DFBRL8R GALLERY [Chicago] and EAMES ARMSTRONG [Washington, DC] - when you want to see more Performance Art!

"I have found Grace Space to be a breath of fresh air, and a new way to see and experience feelings you may have not faced in a long time. It’s a place to let yourself be exposed, amused, delighted, and terrified all at the same time, and I can say I haven’t experienced this combination of emotions at any gallery or theater I have ever stepped into, and that’s a wonderful thing. The space provides a refreshing perspective on an art scene that has been somewhat shackled and restrained for quite a bit of time now. Grace Exhibition Space is a brave pioneer as it puts Bushwick, as well as New York City, on the forefront of exploration and exposure into the minds and bodies of artists who are truly gifted, fearless, and unique." Terri Ciccone. Bushwick Daily January, 2013 "On each night, and in each performance, the human body is redeemed from the mundane and made anew."

David Lagaccia, Williamsburg Greenpoint News+Art (June, 2012)

www.thewgnews.com/2012/07/the-rules-of-grace-bend-em-break-em-and-make-em-performance-art-thrives-at-840-broadway/comment-page-1/#comment-55584