Billy X. Curmano - Performance for the Dead

September 29, 2023, 5-6 pm ET: The Full Moon Exhumed Zoom celebrated the 40th anniversary of Billy X Curmano’s 3-day burial and exhumation Performance for the Dead. It featured a pallbearer, mourner and gravedigger from the original, an appearance by the exhumed corpse and a studio, gravesite and Leaning Grotto of Witoka visitation. In Sympathy performances by the critically acclaimed artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel, LuLu LoLo, Ed Woodham and Bellavia mirrored the In Sympathy international postal exhibition that complemented the live burial.

Portrait of the Artist with Enhanced X-Ray, mixed media, 20” x 30”, Billy X Curmano, 1984

After an Italian Wake, traditional New Orleans style Jazz Funeral and 4-day fast, the soloist was buried (with adequate life support systems) to perform activities beyond the realm of any live audience. His fast continued in absolute darkness as he attempted to lift the veil, perform and commune with the other side. The isolated meditation was carried out in the context of a larger public work. Much as a funeral is meant to comfort survivors, the wake, jazz funeral and postal art were all meant for the live audience. Artists from around the world responded via post and package to the performance, end of life issues and death.

The Performance for the Dead drew the community together as participants and collaborators. They filled the void when traditional funding sources were scared off. Winona Monument Company donated the granite tombstone. The coffin and burial vault were constructed by volunteers. Catherine Mora Cleary brought her whole family for grave digging. Kevin Pomeroy served as a pallbearer. Catherine Schuler Vargas joined the mourners. The three will offer first hand reflections from 40-years past.

Climate… War…slow down. Maybe we’re better off underground.

We believe your participation would greatly enrich the discussions and allow us to delve deeper into this fascinating chapter of art history.

*The event will be recorded and archived for public access via our LOFT program.

Performance for the Dead logo, design Billy X Curmano, 1983

To commemorate Billy X. Curmano’s performance, The Interior Beauty Salon launched a Q&I between the artist and Nicolás. Read the full interview here.

Video documentation of the September 29, 2023, 5-6 pm ET event of Full Moon Exhumed Zoom: Billy X Curmano – 40th Anniversary of “Performance for the Dead”. Recorded on Zoom, edited by Xinan Ran.

Artist Bio

Billy X. Curmano is an award winning artist and former McKnight Foundation Fellow that fuses the performative with more traditional objects. His work has been exhibited and collected extensively from the III Vienna Graphikbiennale to the Museum of Modern Art Library and the Malta National Collection. A 2,367.4-mile Mississippi River Swim from source to gulf, 3-day live burial, 40-day desert fast and sojourn to the Arctic Circle are among his more eccentric environmental performances.

Amused journalists have dubbed him, “The Court Jester of Southeastern Minnesota” with comparisons to P.T. Barnum, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and even…a happy otter.

In Sympathy Artists:

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle have created multi-media art projects about love, sex, and queer ecologies together since 2002. Annie was a sex worker from 1973 to 1995 and morphed into a feminist performance artist and sex educator. In 1994, Beth became a professor of sculpture and intermedia at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she still teaches and directs the E.A.R.T.H. Lab. These days the duo make environmental films with an ecosexual gaze; they also create theater, performance art, eco-activism, and produce symposiums and workshops. Their Wedding to the Earth and the Ecosex Manifesto launched the Ecosex Movement in 2008. Notably, they were official documenta 14 artists, received a 2019 Eureka Fellowship, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. Their new book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position—the Earth as Lover, available at the University of Minnesota Press, chronicles their epic love story and art/life adventures.

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle / Photo: Errich Petersen

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel treads an elusive path that manifests itself performatively through creative experiences that he unfolds within the quotidian. Born in Santiago, Dominican Republic, he was baptized as a Bronxite in 2011. He is the founding director of The Interior Beauty Salon, an organism moving at the intersection of creativity and healing.

LuLu LoLo is a performance artist, playwright/actor and activist. Performing in six Art in Odd Places festivals, her public actions in Where Are the Women? (2015) highlighted the lack of public monuments to women in New York City and was featured in the New York Times. LuLu curated Art in Odd Places (AiOP) 2019: INVISIBLE, 82 artists celebrating the indomitable spirit of artists who are sixty years of age or older. LuLu has written and performed eight one-person plays pertaining to the dramatic struggle of women in New York City’s past. Exploring cemeteries. and reading obituaries has inspired her work.

Ed Woodham is an elder Southern queer. He/they is a Manhattan-based artist, educator, producer, and curator entangled in a mélange of NYC activities across media and culture for over 45 years. Woodham employs humor, irony, subtle detournement, and a striking visual style in order to encourage greater consideration of – and provoke deeper critical engagement with – the urban environment. Woodham created Art in Odd Places (AiOP) to present visual and performance art exploring communication in the democratic space of the public sphere.

Bellavia received her BFA from Buffalo State College and MFA from Alfred University. She exhibits widely from local to international shows. Bellavia was a visiting artist in Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Buffalo NY, and Pittsburgh PA. Bellavia’s performative art includes the “Spirit Guide” live and on the “Death Valley Desert Classic” DVD. More recently she has been at Art In Odd Places and WinterStar/Starwood.

Bellavia’s multimedia works include: Sculpture, Painting, Performance, Collage and Drawing. Her works are in collections in the US, Latvia, Finland and China. Bellavia lives both in Angola, N.Y. and New Orleans, LA.

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Photo: Vika Ryskina

LuLu LoLo / Photo: Paul Takeuchi

Ed Woodham

Bellavia

Original Collaborators of Performance for the Dead:

Kevin Pomeroy is a metal sculptor, builder, designer, city planner and all around tinkerer. His academic degrees are in architecture and urban planning, although he’s happiest behind a tool belt, cutting, assembling and manipulating materials, especially Corten steel. In a past life, over 40 years ago, he owned the Vision Quest Printshop in Winona, MN, a specialty letterpress and offset shop that worked with artists, writers and community organizations. During that era he met Billy X. Curmano and they collaborated on a wide array of projects, including printing, construction and performance. He had the distinct privilege to be pallbearer at Billy’s Jazz Funeral, and to help lower his coffin into the burial vault to begin Billy’s three day Performance for the Dead.

Catherine Mora Cleary: I’m a practitioner of therapeutic bodywork, The Wallace Method, and a minister (like many Hollywood stars!) in Universal Life Church.

I lived in the Twin Cities for 40 years or more, but never got to dig a grave until I moved to Winona MN, met Billy, and became involved in his performances. My children, Adam, Michael and Suzanne were young teenagers when we all helped dig Billy’s grave, attended his New Orleans-style jazz funeral, and were present for both his internment and his exhumation.

I know Billy had several reasons, both personal and political, for creating the Performance for the Dead. I’m glad to be celebrating this milestone in his long career as a performance artist.

Catherine Schuler Vargas: I live in Chicago now, but Winona will always be a part of me. Forty years ago, when I was 22, I was one of the many mourners at Billy Curmano’s Performance for the Dead. Mourning with me was my new friend, Pam Eyden, who had recently moved to town, and who must have thought this was all so strange… So Pam and I mourned together, trailing along behind the casket and a jazz band. Although a lot of that day is a blurred memory, what I do remember was my concern that Billy might not be okay when he was exhumed – but of course, he was, for which I remember being terribly relieved.