Dear friends and supporters,

These past summer months, and into the fall, have been an active and transformative time, for Every house and for Chicago. I look forward to composing a review as best I can in our next newsletter at this eventful year’s end. For now, and for this newsletter, we want to share with you a modified version of Every house director Lin Hixson’s presentation for the panel Performance Art in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, convened on September 20th, 2026.

Those occasions of public conversation about the more distant past usually provoke equal parts excitement and irritation. They engage and provoke, but also distract, from the next looming deadline or the pressing business of preparations for rehearsal. The many acute differences between memory and history assert themselves in these complex conversations, and looking back seems most relevant if it prompts a new consideration of how past events temper, counter, and guide, the present. With that in mind, Lin responded to the invitation by composing a personal timeline, severely limited in scope to the allotted ten minutes, offering a skip of a stone across the waters of time, each detailed moment carrying implicit consequence for the future in which we now find ourselves. So I turn over the rest of this newsletter to Lin’s offering, well worth sharing beyond the context of the event, both for those who missed it and those who attended who might wish to revisit its particular parade. I offer, by way of concluding this introduction, the paragraph from 1908 by the novelist Henry James from the preface to the New York edition of The Aspern Papers, to which Lin refers in her conclusion.

I delight in the palpable imaginable visitable past – in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table. The table is the one, the common expanse, and where we lean, so stretching, we find it firm and continuous. That, to my imagination, is the past fragrant of all, or of almost all, the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone, and yet in which the precious element of closeness, telling so of connexions but tasting so of differences, remains appreciable.

Matthew Goulish
Dramaturg

1976 

Venice Ca. My address: 39 Brooks Avenue. Two blocks from where Chris Burden nailed himself like Jesus to the back of a Volkswagen Bug.

1977

Downtown LA. My address: 1804 Industrial Street. Second floor loft. Three blocks from the Woman’s Building, founded by the Feminist Studio Workshop members Judy Chicago, Arlene Raven, and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, and housing one of the first independent art schools for women offering a two-year program in interdisciplinary arts that included performance, graphics, video, and writing.

1978

Form Hangers, a collaborative performance group. Convert the loft into an illegal performance space where Hangers and many other artists perform until 1980 when it is closed down by the Fire Department.

Start graduate school at Otis Art Institute. There is an emphasis on the individual artist and the gallery system.  I decide to major in performance—a collaborative form where one also has control over presenting one’s own work.

1980–1984

LACE. Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Performance Coordinator. 

Alternative art space. Supports work that pushes boundaries. Located on Broadway, downtown LA, center for working-class Latino families. LACE on the 3rd floor. High Performance magazine on the 5th.  In October, 1980 LACE presents over 30 performances in one month as part of Public Spirit.   

1980 to 1985

Create site-specific, large-scale performances. Some I perform in. Some I direct. All are collaboratively made.

1985

Legal Eagles. Hollywood film. Stars Robert Redford and Debra Winger, as lawyers, and Darryl Hannah, who plays a performance artist. Arne Glimcher, director of PACE Gallery and associate producer of the film, hires me to create a performance art piece after Darryl Hannah rejects an earlier version where she wears black leotards and does an interpretive dance. Darryl and I create the performance art piece together.

Volunteer at CISPES, Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, an organization formed in opposition to the US support of the Salvadoran government and military during its civil war. Create performance parades as demonstrations for the organization.   

1986

Leave LA and move to Chicago to make performance work more slowly. Start the performance company Goat Island with Matthew Goulish, Timothy McCain and Greg McCain. 

We volunteer for the Chicago chapter of CISPES. They connect the company to the Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ. We begin rehearsing in their third floor gym and rehearse there three times a week for the next twenty years.

1986

Brendan de Vallance performs Noosepaper at the State of Illinois building which houses a theater where performance is presented. Today, Google is transforming this building into its regional headquarters.

1979–1998

RSG. Randolph Street Gallery, an artist-run space. Major force in developing new art forms, presenting national and international work. Exhibitions, performances, installations, public art—a center and core bringing artists from all disciplines together to see one another’s work and to welcome a curious public.

1989

Dancer Simone Forti performs her work News Animation Improvisations at RSG. Walks into the room, carries a pile of newspapers, shapes them into a map on the floor. While moving her body in response to the news, she reads the newspaper.

1990

Robert Blanchon, photographer, performance and conceptual artist plasters posters around Chicago that show the current mayor, Richard M. Daley, with the caption “I will not get AIDS”. 

1991

Start teaching full-time at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Performance Department, where I continue to teach performance for the next thirty-two years.

1991

Joan Jett Blakk, drag queen and queer activist, runs for mayor of Chicago as a write-in candidate.   

1992

Chicago Avenue National Guard Armory, future site of the current Museum of Contemporary Art. As part of the exhibition “Art at the Armory: Occupied Territory,” Haha Collaborative—Richard House, Wendy Jacob, Laurie Palmer, and John Ploof—decorate the armory’s visitors’ apartment into K-Mart-chic and then wire the suite of rooms with dynamite. 

1992

Club Lower Links Chicago, an underground performance-art space, cabaret, and bar located at 945 W. Newport Ave.

Lawrence Steger and Iris Moore perform Rough Trade. Friday and Saturday nights. On Friday, Steger performs his performance Bliss and Moore, her performance The Illusion of Conspiracy. On Saturday, Moore performs Steger’s Bliss and Steger performs Moore’s The Illusion of Conspiracy.

1995

Goat Island tours a retrospective of three performances to the United Kingdom with  Lawrence Steger and Iris Moore performing Rough Trade, and the Ritual Trio—Kahil El’Zabar, Ari Brown and Malachi Favors—performing their compositions.

1996

Mark Jeffery, a performance and installation artist from the United Kingdom and Bryan Saner, dancer, choreographer, builder, and contractor, join Goat Island. Today we work with Bryan in our company Every house has a door and Mark is a fellow comrade in all things.

When I prepared this timeline, I was thinking about a quote from the writer Henry James when he talks about “the poetry of the thing outlived.” It was difficult for me to approach the History of Performance in Chicago because I lived so much of it and lived it as an artist. And because I lived it, it was disorderly or tangled or perhaps the best word for it is entangled. So, now as I outlive this history, what I seem to see most clearly is its poetry: interlocking, fluid sites that I define as performance.