AGING AS ART and Performing for the Dead: An evening with Linda Mary Montano and Billy X. Curmano

Using video and interactive performance, Linda Mary Montano and Billy X. Curmano will address their own experiences with aging and dying, culminating in participatory engagement with the audience. Montano sees her body as a canvas, a sculpture that is chiseled by time as she grows older, while Curmano has daringly orchestrated his own funeral in order to perform for the dead, as an act of self- transformation and a rite of passage. Together, these two artists will question the nature of mortality, to both confront and heal unspoken fears and terrors regarding the fear of dying and death itself.

Linda Mary Montano is a seminal figure in contemporary feminist performance art and her work since the mid-1960s has been critical in the development of video by, for, and about women.
Billy X. Curmano is an award-winning artist/adventurer and former McKnight Foundation Interdisciplinary Art Fellow.