Harrison Ford, SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Recipient

 

[On Sunday, 1 March 2026 at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall in Los Angeles, the 32nd Annual Actor Awards (known until November 2025 as the Screen Actors Guild Awards) were presented.  That was also the occasion for the presentation (by actor Woody Harrelson [b. 1961]) of the 2025 SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award.  

[This year’s recipient, the 61st, is actor Harrison Ford, the first to be honored with the newly renamed award. (Up through last year, the award was called the SAG Life Achievement Award because it was originated by the Screen Actors Guild before the 2012 merger with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.)

[The SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award is the highest honor bestowed by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the media professionals’ union, given annually to a performer who fosters the “finest ideals of the acting profession” through career accomplishments and humanitarian work. 

[The honoree is nominated and chosen by the SAG-AFTRA National Honors and Tributes Committee. The award celebrates lifelong dedication to the craft and society.  To qualify, a candidate must be a well-established performer who has improved the image of the acting profession and maintained active involvement in humanitarian or public service endeavors. 

[Two previous recipients of the award, whose careers have been profiled on Rick On Theater, are Barbra Streisand (17 September 2024), the 59th awardee, and Jane Fonda (22 March 2025), the 60th.] 

“HARRISON FORD: HERO OF OUR HEARTS”

[This Harrison Ford profile appeared in the membership magazine SAG-AFTRA (15.2 – Spring 2026).  It was followed by an interview of Ford by the union president, Sean Astin, which I have also reposted below.]

“I was not an overnight success. I struggled for about 15 years, going from acting jobs to carpentry and back to acting, until I finally got a part in a wildly successful film. None of this happened on my own.”

These simple words from 61st SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award recipient Harrison Ford [b. 1942], delivered to a room of his fellow actors during The 32nd Annual Actor Awards Presented by SAG-AFTRA, were fitting and expected of an actor whose decades of work have been the blueprint for today’s modern movie hero. Simple yet humble, with special words of thanks and a life’s worth of gratitude to longtime colleagues in the industry, those few sentences showed the audience and viewers exactly what makes Ford something of a hero among his peers: an individual whose screen work and real life retain their own standard of excellence.

THE UNDERDOG

Once upon a time, the Academy Award- and Golden Globe-nominated performer, now 83, was anything but an A-lister. First came his expulsion [for plagiarism, four days before graduation] from Ripon College in Wisconsin — where he enrolled in his first acting class. A short time later, he was dropped from a contract with Columbian [see anecdote in following article] and, after being limited to small roles, left his Universal contract early in search of better opportunities. It was his self-taught vocation of carpentry that enabled him to continue auditioning in Hollywood and instilled within him the long-held values that have enabled him to become exalted in his profession: self-direction, steadfastness, concentration and perseverance.

His work on George Lucas’ American Graffiti in 1973 followed what was already a decade of other onscreen performances. But it was also a step in the right direction, because what came a few years later, in 1976, changed the trajectory of Ford’s career: another chance meeting with Lucas [b. 1944]. One that turned into a favor helping read lines for the director’s upcoming sci-fi production — a little thing called Star Wars [1977], which went on to gross over $410 million at the box office during its theatrical release.

Maybe you’ve heard of Han Solo?

Or perhaps you’re more familiar with another role that came a few years later. That one was for another action film for another director — a guy named Steven Spielberg [b. 1946]. It was called Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981], and it grossed nearly $390 million in theaters.

What started as a career with the odds stacked against him has turned into decades of successes in Ford’s toolbelt.

THE (SOMETIMES) HERO

If Ford’s career has ever been regarded as a stroke of luck, his work in the years following the late ’70s and early ’80s serves to prove any naysayer wrong. He’s played a hero or other “good guy” across genres — Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott’s [b. 1937] futuristic masterpiece Blade Runner [1982]; Detective John Book in the crime thriller Witness [1985; Peter Weir (b. 1944)]; President James Marshall in the action film Air Force One [1997; Wolfgang Petersen (1941-2022)]; and playboy-turned-romantic lead Linus Larrabee in the 1995 film adaptation of Sabrina [Sydney Pollack (1934-2008)].

But what’s made him a favorite among moviegoers and earned him the Golden Globe’s Cecil B. DeMille Award [2002], the Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute [2000], the Cannes Film Festival’s Honorary Palme d’Or [2023] and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame [2003] has been the performances themselves. What Ford has always demonstrated is an understanding of the human spirit that goes beyond surface level. Hidden within the snappy one-liners and scruffy looks of his most notable roles has always been a performer with an innate knowledge of people: their honesty and deceit; their reluctance and sense of responsibility. It’s the times when he gives The Chosen One a helpful push in the right direction — and follows his own advice — that makes him a hero of the galaxy. It’s the moment he sees the half-human fugitives he’s meant to hunt as something more, and whole, that propels a sci-fi flick into a seminal work of the genre.

Ford’s humanist approach is all the more compelling in roles where he’s gone against Hollywood’s expectations and played the villain. Whether it’s been as the manipulative husband Dr. Norman Spencer in What Lies Beneath [Robert Zemeckis (b. 1951); 2000] or the obsessive patriarch Allie Fox in The Mosquito Coast [Peter Weir; 1986], what makes those moments of betrayal and disaster all the more memorable to audiences is everything that happens before. The scenes where his characters shift from their most charming, doting and morally upright to manipulative, controlling and abusive.

“I [perform] because it’s what I want to do; what I know how to do,” said Ford in a 1997 interview with Charlie Rose. “It’s where I feel the most engaged, challenged and useful. There’s nothing that I do that stimulates me more, scares me and engages me as much as making movies.”

Yet Ford has found just as much success on the small screen. Having previously guest-starred on TV shows such as Gunsmoke [1972, 1973; CBS], The Mod Squad [1968; ABC] and Ironside [1967; NBC], he has gained praise for his two most recent television projects, Yellowstone prequel 1923 [15 episodes, 2023, 2025; Paramount+] and, most notably, Shrinking [33 episodes, 2023, 2024, 2026; Apple TV+]. Both projects have allowed Ford to continue to demonstrate his range for making his characters feel as noble as any gunslinging lawman of the Wild West or as familiar as that one guy in the office who everybody knows.

As the Dutton family patriarch, Jacob, in 1923, Ford’s performances come with fire in his eyes and grit in his voice. But while his sheriff’s badge glints silver, the man underneath is shown to be desperate to keep his family’s livelihood and town from falling into chaos. On the other end of the spectrum, therapist Dr. Paul Rhoades [Ford’s character in Shrinking] is a role where Ford uses improvisation and embodies a gruff, “straight man” brand of humor.

Yet, it’s the tender moments, when his character is shown to enjoy spending time with his doctor-turned-girlfriend or battling with the increasing symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease that stay with viewers. Season two, episode 12 [24 December 2024], “The Last Thanksgiving,” is a certified fan favorite, and Ford’s work on the show earned him a first-time Screen Actors Guild Awards® nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series in 2025.

If good things get better over time, then Ford’s six decades of work prove the old adage is especially true with good storytelling. With experience and a willingness to explore and test one’s own boundaries comes a unique talent: an ability to let audiences be in awe about the best and worst embodiment of a person without judgment.

“I found a calling, a life in storytelling; an identity in pretending to be other people. The work I do with other actors is one of the great joys of my life. My career is built on their work, as well as the work of writers, directors and every single cast member — every crew member I’ve ever been on the set with. I’ve had incredible collaborators every step of the way, and being able to deliver the work we create together to an audience is an honor and a privilege. . . . [Through it] I’ve come to know myself,” said Ford.

THE HUMAN ABOVE ALL

As well-known as Ford is for his professional work, his life away from the limelight is as dynamic as his most heroic portrayals.

The urban legends surrounding his life as a carpenter are quite well-known to fans. Ford is just as famously known as a real-life pilot and has volunteered for many search-and-rescue efforts. Additionally, his early knowledge of the wilderness, stemming from both a love of nature and early years spent as a Boy Scout, has developed into tireless advocacy for environmental causes both in the United States and abroad, including his delivery of testimony before the United Nations Climate Summit for forest and ocean conservation. In 2018, Ford was a recipient of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s Artist Inspiration Award for what was then 25 years of service to environmental nonprofit Conservation International, as well as his longtime commitment as a member of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s Actors’ Council.  

In the end, it may be that Ford will be remembered as a person who chose for both his life and career the responsibility of advocacy, both for his fellow actors and the world.

Said SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin [b. 1971] of the Life Achievement Award honoree, “Harrison Ford is a singular presence in American life; an actor whose iconic characters have shaped world culture. His career has been endlessly exciting, always returning to his love of acting. We are honored to celebrate a legend whose impact on our craft is indelible.”

Nominated and voted on by the SAG-AFTRA National Honors and Tributes Committee, the Life Achievement Award is awarded annually at the Actor Awards. Considered the union’s highest honor, the award is bestowed to those whose professional and philanthropic contributions bring prestige to the craft of acting and attention to public service efforts. Ford is the awards’ 61st recipient.

*  *  *  *
“HARRISON FORD & THE LIFE OF A WORKING ACTOR” 

[This “Actor to Actor” interview of Harrison by Sean Astin appeared in the membership magazine SAG-AFTRA 15.2 (Spring 2026).]

The 61st Life Achievement Honoree Joins SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin for an Impactful Actor to Actor Interview

Harrison Ford believes in work. He prefers the term “working actor” over “icon” and attests to the power of “putting the work in” in order to be a professional. The result of Ford’s dedication to craft has been his legacy as a performer exalted in the profession. Following the announcement that he was selected to be the 61st SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award honoree, Ford sat down with SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin for an Actor to Actor interview. The following is an abridged version of their conversation that took place on Feb. 4.

SEAN ASTIN: Mr. Ford, Welcome to the SAG-AFTRA headquarters. And congratulations on being this year’s recipient of the Life Achievement Award.

HARRISON FORD: Thank you very much.

ASTIN: I looked up the word “iconic.” [That was] my first thought when they told me they wanted to see if you would accept this award. I thought, “Well he’s iconic.” Can you live with the word “iconic”?

FORD: No, I’d really rather live with the words “working actor.”

ASTIN: So a lot of our performers are in the audition process. It’s all about auditioning on videotape from home — the self tape. And it’s turned into a great convenience. And it makes me think about the contract time; when you’re doing all those auditions under contract.

FORD: Well, the best thing about being under contract is they never put me up for anything I had to audition for.

ASTIN: So that’s it? You’re in the rotation and you just . . .

FORD: Well, because my part often was nothing more than, “Mr. Jones? Paging Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones?” I was under contract at Columbia Pictures for seven years. The first thing they put me in, I was able to remember all the lines of the character I played: a bellboy [Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round. 1966; uncredited]. And I was summoned to the office of the executive of Columbia Pictures that was in charge of the new talent program. He said, “You’re never gonna make it in this business.” And this is on the basis of delivering a telegram. And he said, “Let me tell you a story.” He said, “The first time Tony Curtis was ever in a movie, he delivered a bag of groceries. You took one look at that guy and you say, ‘That’s a movie star.’” I leaned across the desk and said, “I thought you were supposed to think that that was a grocery delivery boy.” He said, “Get the eff out of here.” And I did.

ASTIN: Some actors carry with them self-doubt.

FORD: I can carry both. I mean, I carried both. I carried a belief that I would learn to do this. But a belief also that it was a really hard space to own, and many people were not as successful as they wanted to be in the choice of that as a career. But I was not easily dissuaded. Partially, because I thought that it would take time, and that I was learning . . . To be frank, it was a difficult time in my life. I had kids, and I was struggling with money. But it was a job and I was glad to have it.

ASTIN: I remember Witness. When it came out, I was younger and thinking “Oh, that’s what an actor [does]. You were committed to being an actor. That meant something to me.”

FORD: Well, having seen what you’ve done, I appreciate that very much.

ASTIN: I was in a film trilogy [The Ring Trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003)] . . . There were a thousand moments where the director Peter Jackson would talk about the audience. “This is what I want the audience to be feeling. This is what the audience is thinking.” And I never thought of it like that. I wonder, has that ever been a part of your . . .

FORD: Oh, yeah. I think I’m always aware of the audience and wanting to bring them along. I want to create an experience for them . . . I work for them. That’s my job. And I think about the clarity of what we’re doing. I think about the energy of what we’re doing. I think about the emotion that we’re hoping to create.

ASTIN: You’ve talked [about loving] the process of filming. And I think a lot of actors, maybe many actors, don’t have those conversations with the filmmaker or the screenwriter.

FORD: Then that’s a shame. It’s often unfortunate that an actor comes into a project and doesn’t get a fair share of the director’s attention. Especially actors without a lot of experience.

ASTIN: Well, that’s — I was going to say counterintuitive. But I guess that makes sense that people without a lot of experience would need more of that.

FORD: Not necessarily need more advice, but I think it helps to feel that the director is somehow connected to what you’re doing. And it’s not just an incidental moment, but that it means something. That’s the only way you know what to do. It’s your concept of what the task is. When you say that line, what is the intention that the writer had in mind? What is it you’re hoping to elicit from the audience? What are you feeling? Are you really there? Or is the character really there in that moment? All of those things. It would help to know that the director notices what you’re doing . . . I remember coming in at the beginning of my career, coming onto a set and just feeling like I didn’t belong there. Not knowing how to behave really.

It is often the case that you develop a relationship with the director that is open and fruitful. And there are other cases where that’s not part of his skill necessarily, or not part of your skill, but you still have to attend to the story and your character’s responsibility in the telling of the story. So you can do without that, but it helps to have a little feeling of being accepted, being appreciated.

ASTIN: What I hear you describing is fundamental humility. There must be some kind of discipline you have to have not to abuse it. Or are you just saying, “Hey, no, this is this project. This is this story. These are these characters.”

FORD: You may have a different concept than the director. And you may persist in that concept, as I did with Ridley Scott in Blade Runner, famously. He had a very different idea of the character than what I felt was necessary to drive that character for myself. I had to believe that I was human. Ridley insisted on believing I was replicant, and that I would know it. I said, “I cannot communicate from that point, that place.” I would think that I’m human.

ASTIN: All right, so this is an award being presented to you by a union which you have been a member of [since 1966].

FORD: It’s such a hard thing to be a professional actor. From the very beginning, it’s impossible. And then there’s a crack, and you get a job, and you become a member of the union. And that’s a big, big deal because then you have the support of the union. You have insurance, you have someone speaking for you to the bosses . . . I would never say I was an actor until I was being paid for it. Now that’s my little twist of mind, because that doesn’t really make sense.

ASTIN: Sure it does. Professional. When you’re a professional, you're getting paid for it.

FORD: Yeah, but if you don’t have what an actor needs, you’re not an actor, even if you’re getting paid for it. I mean, it’s a spirit. It’s a diagnosis too. It’s a complicated thing. The thing is that you can’t do it alone. You have to be employed. You have to be in the company of other actors. You can do it for free, but you have to feel like it’s important. You have to feel committed to it and to make it real.

ASTIN: This is a big moment right now for the industry. The culture has changed and the business.

FORD: The business has changed remarkably. And we don’t have the support of movie theaters as much as we used to have. And that is a damn shame. That community experience produces positive effects in the culture. We’ve been disaggregated into serviceable economic units, but there’s not the general feeling of community that we used to have when movies had captured the zeitgeist. They were needed. And they were telling a story that was needed. And that story was a positive contribution to the culture.

ASTIN: It’s still possible. You’re doing it. You’re breaking through [and] reaching other people.

FORD: You’re not in a dark room with people that you don’t know and who you begin to know because you experience a common humanity. That’s a very powerful effect.

ASTIN: I grew to know you in many movies. [It’s an] absolute lifetime achievement for me to get to sit here and interview you.

FORD: Appreciate it.

ASTIN: Much love to you. From all the actors, thank you.

'Seagull: True Story'

 

[Readers of Rick On Theater, even those who aren’t theater folk, probably know that Anton Chekhov, the renowned turn-of-the-20th-century Russian dramatist, is a beloved figure in the Western theater world.  Actors and directors, especially, love to do his plays.  He has a prominent place in nearly every repertory theater’s repertoire. 

[Chekhov’s plays are translated into almost every known language.  They’re also adapted and modernized almost as often as William Shakespeare’s are.  Below is the story, told via an interview with the play’s 34-year-old director, of one of those adaptations.  

[The play, The Seagull, which is about theater and theater people—two actresses and a playwright, has become a vehicle for the director, an exile from Chekhov’s own country, who conceived the adaptation, to tell his own story, 118 years after the playwright’s death.]

“RUSSIANS WHO FLED AFTER UKRAINE INVASION
STAGE FRESH TAKE ON CLASSIC PLAY IN U.S.”
by Jeffrey Brown, Zeba Warsi, and Anne Azzi Davenport

[This segment on PBS News Hour on Tuesday, 19 May 2026, caught my attention for two reasons.  One, it was an interesting theater story: a young, émigré Russian stage director of some accomplishment who fled Putin’s autocratic regime under duress, made a play based on a Chekhov classic that told his own story, got it produced at New York City’s esteemed Public Theater to considerable acclaim.

[And two, I hadn’t heard about it—or him—though he’d been here, working, since 2022 and his play has been staged a few times since early 2025!  So, maybe others missed the memo, too.]

Two Russians who left their country after the invasion of Ukraine and are now rebuilding their lives and careers in the U.S. Senior Arts Correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports on a recent production in New York for our Art in Action series, exploring how art and democracy shape one another, as part of our CANVAS coverage.

Geoff Bennett [Co-anchor of “PBS News Hour”]: Now a different kind of migration story, one involving theater and two Russians who left their country after the invasion of Ukraine and are now rebuilding their lives and careers in the U.S.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports on a recent production in New York for our Art in Action series exploring how art and democracy shape one another as part of our Canvas coverage.

Jeffrey Brown: [On screen: a performance; singing in Russian.] It’s a play within a play, with cabaret humor, even slapstick, alongside the drama of loss of friends, family and country.

Alexander Molochnikov: [Giving a curtain speech.] And I’m very thankful to all of you for allowing me to tell the personal, sometimes even dramatic story in a playful way.

Jeffrey Brown: For Alexander Molochnikov [Александр Молочников; often romanized as Aleksandr Molochnikov; b. 1992], the creator and director of “Seagull: True Story” [written by Eli Rarey (b 1977), with music by Fedor Zhuravlev (b. 1995)] this is personal. It’s based on his own story.

[Molochnikov is a writer, filmmaker, and internationally acclaimed theater director. He worked for over 10 years in Moscow where he directed five major productions in drama, a ballet, an opera, two feature films, and a TV show.

[Molochnikov has created and directed over 10 shows and films in Moscow including the most-viewed six-episode TV series, The Monastery (Монастырь – Monastyr), in 2022. His production of the operas The Telephone and The Medium by Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007) premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre, along with his ballet, The Seagull: Interrupted Flight, which was honored with the Golden Mask (Золотая маска – Zolotaya maska; the Russian equivalent of the Tony Awards) for best ballet of the year.

[Since 2014, his first play, 19.14, an antiwar cabaret play about World War I, had been running in repertoire for over 11 years at the Moscow Art Theater of Chekov. However, the theater has removed his name from all materials. The billing now says “Directed by Director” because the names of directors who supported Ukraine in 2022 no longer appear in print.

[In 2022, he spoke out against the Russian military invasion of Ukraine and then in August, he moved to New York. Molochnikov is now unable to return to Russia. He became a U.S. citizen in early 2026, roughly four years after fleeing Russia.

[His feature film, Tell Her (Скажи ей – skazhi yey), about moving to the U.S. as a child, premiered in 2020 at the 47th Seattle International Film Festival. He premiered a cabaret-style stage adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel, Crime and Punishment (1866), at the Tel Aviv Gesher Theatre in December 2024. He is working now on a feature film related to the novel.

[His short film Extremist (Экстремистка – Ekstremistka) premiered at the 2025 Telluride (Colorado) Film Festival and won the 2025 BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Student Award for Live Action (as well as the Special Jury Prize); he is now turning it into a feature.]

What did you most want to bring out in this play?

Alexander Molochnikov: I think the value of art, the value of art as air and water for some people, and not only for people who make it, but sometimes for people who watch it. With choosing between food and art, anybody would choose food if we are dying of hunger.

But, for me, I literally realized through this experience how, without doing theater, I start kind of dying inside.

Jeffrey Brown: [On screen: scenes from the play.] “Seagull: True Story,” recently at New York’s Public Theater [26 March-3 May 2026], plays off Anton Chekhov’s classic “The Seagull” and tells of a young Russian theater director named Kon, Molochnikov’s alter ego, about to achieve his dream of directing a play at the world-renowned Moscow Art Theater, when a very different kind of drama intervenes, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

[The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Russian playwright and short story writer, premièred in 1896 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. (Its title is sometimes rendered in English as The Sea Gull, A Seagull, or A Sea Gull. The Russian title, Chaika [Чайка], has no article (because there are no articles in the Russian language), so it can also be translated as simply Seagull.)

[The character in the original version who becomes Kon, the avatar of Molochnikov in the adaptation, is a symbolist playwright named Konstantin Treplev. (Prior to its Public Theater run, the play was presented Off-Off-Broadway at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club from 16 May to 1 June 2025. From 17 to 19 January 2025, a workshop version of the play was staged under the “working title” Seagull Fucker at La MaMa as part of the Under the Radar Festival.)  

[The first production of Seagull in Saint Petersburg was famously a failure. Not only the play, but Chekhov’s reputation as a dramatist was all but written off.  Then, in 1898, the famous director Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), cofounder of the Moscow Art Theater, directed it for his troupe, and the production was a success.

[The playwright’s career was saved and The Seagull has since generally been considered the first of Chekhov’s four major plays and one of the masterpieces of modern Western theater.

[The famous Moscow Art Theater opened in 1898, after Stanislavsky, a talented, forward-looking amateur actor and director from a wealthy family, and the successful professional, establishment playwright, critic, and drama teacher Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858-1943), met at Nemirovich-Danchenko’s invitation for an 18-hour discussion in 1897. Both men, who knew only each other’s reputations, wanted to reform the clichéd, melodramatic mainstream Russian theater.

[To develop and teach his acting “system,” which eventually changed the acting style and actor-training practices of almost all Western theater (and formed the basis of the Method), Stanislavsky began opening MAT studios for training actors in 1912, and MAT eventually opened the MAT School in 1943. 

[The theater, which went through a series of name-changes—it didn’t actually become the Moscow Art Theater until 1901—split into two theaters in 1987: the Gorky Moscow Art Theater, the descendant of the original theater, and the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, the house in which the young Molochnikov worked.]

Alexander Molochnikov: In the beginning, you don’t think it’s forever. Or maybe some people understood. I didn’t.

Jeffrey Brown: Four years later, Molochnikov, who in his 20s had already directed productions at leading Moscow theaters, including the Bolshoi . . .

Man [actor in cast rehearsing on stage]: Happy birthday!

Jeffrey Brown: . . . celebrated his 34th birthday with the cast of “Seagull” in New York, where he now lives and works.

Alexander Molochnikov: Oh, wow.

Woman: Make a wish.

Sofia Kapkov, Producer: I had a team of 40 people who was working for me. I signed all documents and I left.

Jeffrey Brown: Also a new New Yorker, the producer of “Seagull: True Story,” 47-year-old Sofia Kapkov [b. 1978].

Sofia Kapkov: I came here without any plan, so I stayed with my friend. I told him I’m going to be there for a week. I ended up for a month. And then after a month, I realized that’s it. That life is gone.

Jeffrey Brown: That former life included heading her own production company that put on prominent contemporary theater and dance performances in Russia and abroad, not overtly political art, but she says a form of activism nonetheless.

Sofia Kapkov: I wanted to open this window to the freedom to show them, OK, another world exists. There is different type of art, for example, or different forms of art. And in a way, this is my type of activism to show something that is relevant, that it’s timely.

Jeffrey Brown: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ended that. She left within days, taking her two younger children, joining an older daughter who was studying at NYU.

Sofia Kapkov: I had a nice life back then. I had a comfortable life. I had home, friends, projects, successful business.

But I had my doubts in my country. I woke up in the reality that we are killing our neighbors. For me, it was obvious I need to live for the sake of my kids. I don’t want them to get used to the idea that war is normal. And it’s a very hard decision, because you’re not just changing your life from one comfortable life to less comfortable.

You’re changing the destiny of your kids. It’s a very big responsibility.

Jeffrey Brown: Huge changes, big struggles documented in a memoir titled “Arts Hustler: A Story of Resilience” [MART Foundation, 2025], along with some advantages, including having international experience and contacts.

And within two years, she had co-produced “Our Class,” a play [by Tadeusz Słobodzianek (Polish; b. 1955)] set in Poland during World War II about neighbors turning on neighbors. It had successful runs in New York [Classic Stage Company, 12 September-3 November 2024], Boston [Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 13-22 June 2025], and most recently San Francisco [Z Space’s Steindler Stage, 27 March-5 April 2026]. 

In prewar Moscow, Alexander Molochnikov had demonstrated in support of prominent Russian dissident and opposition leader Alexei Navalny [1976-2024]. And after the invasion of Ukraine, he registered his protest with a series of anti-war posts on social media and danced to Ukrainian music in the Russian version of “Dancing With the Stars” [video clip of Molochnikov dancing]. 

His name was taken off production credits and he says he received death threats. In August 2022, he left Russia, enrolling in a graduate film course at Columbia University.

[Immediately after he publicly criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Molochnikov says, he received threats against his safety from the state-funded Wagner Group, the private military company controlled at that time by Yevgeny Prigozhin (1961-2023), a former close ally Vladimir Putin (b. 1952; President of Russia: 2000-08 and 2012-present). The young theater artist reports that mercenaries from the Wagner Group sent him photographs of his parents’ houses in Moscow and Saint Petersburg with such text warnings as “Be careful walking there, you might slip and fall into a pond.”]

From that came a short film titled “Extremist” based on the true story of a young Russian woman whose public protest of the Ukraine war, putting anti-war and anti-Putin messages on grocery items, led to her imprisonment. [Scenes from the film are shown, with balalaika music (“Kalinka,” Russian folk-style song written in 1860 by Ivan Larionov [1830-89]) from the soundtrack.] The film would win various international awards and was also short-listed for an Academy Award for best live-action short.

Today, Molochnikov can see the positive impact of the upheaval he went through.

Alexander Molochnikov: Because collapse motivates you to rebuild and really develop as a person. I didn’t really want it to happen again. We just, like, built something here. I would love a few more years to build more.

But the feeling of apocalypse – and, of course, I want to say that, like, this my little art apocalypse is nothing compared to what people lost in Ukraine. But, still, you lose your career that you’ve been building for 10 years. It’s healthy sometimes to lose it.

Jeffrey Brown: The second half of “Seagull: True Story” is partly based on Molochnikov’s experience after coming to the U.S., including the overt commercialism of the theater world here and what he says were different kinds of restrictions on language and expression he encountered.

[Since we don't have official censorship in the United States, as Molochnikov had experienced in Russia under Putin, when he speaks of “restrictions on language and expression,” he’s talking about “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” ideological conformity, and similar socio-political pressures.

[In 2025, in Cultured, a print and digital magazine about contemporary art, architecture, design, fashion, film, and music, the émigré director asserts, “There are so many things everyone is afraid to talk about [in the U.S.] because we’re afraid society will turn against you. We’re afraid of a witch hunt. We’re afraid to say something that would offend someone when you didn’t mean to offend them.”

[Last April, Molochnikov told the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper of Columbia University, that many Americans don’t seem to “know how to be free in their society, because of the control over what you can say, words you can use, things that are possible to talk about, and impossible to talk about.”]

And the play includes a moment amid the crackdown in Russia in which one character asked the American audience:

Actor [scene from the play]: And something like this could never happen in America, right?

Actor: Right?

Alexander Molochnikov: Right?

And there’s always – it’s interesting. It’s not a laugh. it’s not a clap. Everyone’s like, oh.

Sofia Kapkov: It just is a concern.

Alexander Molochnikov: I hope that that this play, maybe not in everyone, but in somebody, it would leave some thought or some concern about what’s going on in U.S. today, and I hear it a lot. And many people who saw it a year ago, now they’re like, wow, this is about Iran now.

Jeffrey Brown: Molochnikov and Kapkov say New York is their home now. Both have become U.S. citizens and aim to further build lives here with their artistic work leading the way.

Sofia Kapkov: Theater is very similar to democracy. It should be a free space. There people are allowed to ask any questions. I believe in democracy, and I love this country, and I have hope for America. I’m American now, right?

I don’t have any hope for Russia, unfortunately. And what Putin did, he destroyed life of many generations. I don’t like a lot of stuff that’s going on here in America, but America is even younger than the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

Jeffrey Brown: America, the country.

Sofia Kapkov: America, the country, United States.

[Though the famous theater, opera, and ballet company didn’t acquire the name Bolshoi Theater until 1825, the linear ancestor of the company, which actually had no formal designation, was founded on 28 March 1776 (by license from Empress Catherine II [1729-96; Empress of Russia: 1762-96; commonly known as Catherine the Great]). That’s exactly 98 days (or 14 weeks) before Independence Day, when the U.S. was officially born.

[The name (in Russian: Большо́й Теа́тр) means “Big Theater” or “Grand Theater” to distinguish it from the Maly Theater (Малый Театр), which means “Little Theater” or “Small Theater.” Many cities, such as Saint Petersburg/Leningrad and Moscow, had both, among the many entertainment venues.

[In 18th- and 19th-century Imperial Russia, the designations signified an official categorization of a theater's artistic discipline and its rank within the Imperial Theaters system. The Bolshoi Theaters were designated for grand-scale productions like opera and ballet, which require larger auditoriums to accommodate orchestras, large choruses, and elaborate sets. The Maly Theaters were authorized for dramatic plays, comedies, and spoken theater which are better served in intimate settings constructed so that the performances are closer to the audience.]

Jeffrey Brown: [Over a scene with singing and music.] Good perspective from the theater world to today’s political realities.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in New York.

[I observed in my introduction to this post that the plays of Anton Chekhov are popular with theater people: repertory theaters like to produce them, actors like to act in them, and directors like to direct them.  I also noted that Seagull held a special place among Chekhov’s works because it’s about theater and theater artists.

[One example of the phenomenon is experimental theater director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), about whom I’ve blogged many times on ROT.  He acknowledged that Seagull was deeply meaningful to him since he saw a school production of it as a prep school student.  Seagull stayed with Shapiro for the rest of his life.

[Before he’d ever staged a production of Seagull, Shapiro confessed to me, he’d long wanted to direct “an all-star, multi-racial” production of the play in Central Park for Joseph Papp (1921-91).  It was a recurring dream—which never came true.  The play had “always been mixed up in my mind with the love of literature and with idealism,” he explained, but he also admitted that he’d always wanted to direct The Seagull because of the “schmaltz” as well as the “lyricism.” 

[The play had long been a symbol for Shapiro, figuring prominently on a list of influences and inspirations he once wrote out for me.  He even invoked it in a 1965 playlet from his early college days.  When an old New York cabbie morphs into Joe Cino (1931-67), the seminal Off-Off-Broadway café-owner and impresario, the young passenger, a stand-in for Shapiro, asks, “Who are you?” and the cabbie replies, “I am a seagull.  No, that’s not it.”  These are the same words Nina says to Konstantin in Act IV of the play.  Apparently, 19-year-old Shapiro had already cast himself in that role.

[The play “speaks to artists about creativity,” said Shapiro, “and getting caught up in the ‘theater world.’”  He explained that the “basic values” of The Seagull are “love and art,” and that the “theme” was “showing the audience the need for art” in society. 

[(Note that Mokochnikov says above that the message he sees in Seagull is “the value of art, the value of art as air and water for some people, and not only for people who make it, but sometimes for people who watch it.”  The Russian’s statement is, I daresay, the same sentiment as Shapiro expressed.) 

[In the fall of 1992, Shapiro directed Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven, which was Shapiro’s last New York production and centers loosely on a film production of The Seagull involving several of Blue Heaven’s characters.  For the promotional postcard for Blue Heaven, Shapiro posed the cast and crew in a restaging of a photograph of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s first rehearsal of Seagull in 1898, with Malpede sitting in Chekhov’s place and Shapiro in Stanislavsky’s.

[Ironically, Shapiro eventually directed a production of The Seagull, with the Riverside Repertory Theatre Company of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1996.  It was his last work.  

[In the final year of his life, Shapiro approached Riverside and told the company, “I’m about to die, I want my final show to be The Seagull, and I want you all to be in it.”  Over a five-month period, the company “camped out” three or four days a week near Shapiro’s mountain cabin, spending days on the small, white backyard stage that Shapiro had built against the mountain background—reminiscent of the one for Konstantin’s play.

[Shapiro had initially resisted chemotherapy, but when he started working with Riverside, several company members reported, he began undergoing the treatment.  They figured it was a way to prolong his life in order to finish the play.  Seagull, one cast member felt, helped him decide to take the chemotherapy “so that we wouldn’t have to finish the play without him.” 

[The Riverside Seagull played in Albuquerque from 5 to 14 September 1996 and then in Baltimore, Maryland, from 6 to 17 November.  Shapiro hadn’t been able to travel with his cast, but he lived to see their success in the town—and at the theater—where, 23 years earlier his Shaliko Company débuted.  Leo Shapiro died of cancer on 22 January 1997, 15 days after his 51st birthday (and 18 months after he was diagnosed and given 6 months to live).

[It’s perhaps an interesting sidelight to Shapiro’s special feeling for The Seagull that he had such a proprietary attitude toward the play that he apparently resented when even another artist whom he admired appropriated it.  Tennessee Williams (1911-83), an inspiration and model for Shapiro, wrote his own adaptation of Chekhov’s play, The Notebook of Trigorin, in 1981. 

[Shapiro was aware of Williams’s adaptation, and on 14 December 1992, shortly after the downtown opening of the Shaliko production of Blue Heaven with The Seagull at its center, a staged reading of Williams’s play was performed uptown at Lincoln Center.  Shapiro refused to go despite his special interest in the writer and the source. 

[In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Jeffrey BrownJeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists.  

[Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Zeba Warsi is a foreign affairs producer, based in Washington DC.  She’s a Columbia Journalism School graduate with an M.A. in Political journalism.  She was one of the leading members of the News Hour team that won the 2024 Peabody award for News for our coverage of the war in Gaza and Israel.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS News Hour.]

Feminist Performance Art

 

[I’ve blogged a bit on performance art on Rick On Theater: “Lady Gaga: Artist For Our Time” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2011), “Performance Art, Part 1” (7 November 2013) and “Part 2” (10 November 2013), “Penny Arcade: Two Performances” (15 November 2013), “‘The Second Life of Performance’” by Katie Kitamura (10 January 2016), and “‘Art That Flows From a Will to Live’: Marina Abramović, Performance Artist” by Jessica Testa (7 September 2024). 

[The reason there’s not more is that, frankly, it’s not a subject about which I know a great deal.  (My appreciation of performance art is more for what its innovations and experimentation contribute to more conventional theater than for the live art itself that the artists make.) 

[However, when I read the article below on the revival, so to speak, of interest in the feminist performance artists of the late-middle 20th century, my attention was piqued.  I decided it was more than worth sharing with ROTters; I hope you’ll agree when you read it yourselves.] 

“THE RADICALS”
by Amanda Fortini

[The article below, published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 17 May 2026, was also posted on the Times website as “Is Yoko Ono Still Our Most Radical Artist?” on 30 April.]

A crop of recent exhibitions prove how feminist performance art from the 1960s and ’70s is more relevant than ever.

In March 1965, almost two years before she’d meet John Lennon [1940-80] and form their infamous alliance, Yoko Ono [b. 1933] staged “Cut Piece,” a groundbreaking work of performance art, at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. It was the third presentation of the work (the first two were staged in Kyoto and Tokyo in the summer of 1964), but this one was filmed by the documentarians David [1931-87] and Albert Maysles [1926-2015] and has thus been preserved for posterity as a nine-minute black-and-white film. Ono, then an avant-garde artist known for her involvement in the Fluxus movement, sits impassively onstage next to a pair of fabric shears. She is dressed in clothes of obvious quality (an elegant black sweater suit with pearl buttons, a silk slip underneath, fishnet pantyhose), which members of the audience, strangers to the artist, are invited to approach and snip off.

[A very brief bio of Yoko Ono: Ono, an artist, musician, activist, filmmaker, and performance artist, was born in Tokyo. Her father was a wealthy banker and, during Ono’s early years, was transferred to bank branches all over the world, including San Francisco (1933, two weeks before his daughter’s birth), New York City (1940), and Hanoi (1941).

[In 1945, after World War II, Ono’s father moved to Scarsdale, New York, but Ono remained in Japan until 1952, when she joined her family. She enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, where, among other subjects, she studied music composition. She became interested in twelve-tone music and then moved into the “avant-garde.”

[In the ’50s and ’60s, Ono lived an eventful life, including two marriages, the birth of a daughter, and exploration with music and art of a decidedly experimental nature. She exhibited and performed in several venues. She came to London in September 1966 and met John Lennon in November at an exhibit of her conceptual art. He was intrigued by her art, and in September 1967, Lennon, who was still married to his first wife at the time, sponsored her solo show at a London gallery.

[Lennon’s first marriage was terminated in November 1968, and he and Ono collaborated on a number of works during the last two years of the Beatles, 1969 and ’70, and attended many public protests against the war in Vietnam. The couple married in March 1969. They had formed the Plastic Ono Band in 1968 as an outlet for their collaborative work.

[Ono and Lennon moved to New York City to escape the press attention, especially the racial prejudice in the media directed at Ono, in August 1971. They initially settled in Greenwich Village, but moved to the Dakota Apartments on the Upper West Side on Central Park West, between 72nd and 73rd Streets, in 1973.

[On 8 December 1980, Lennon, returning home with Ono after a recording session, was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman (b. 1955), who remains in prison on a 20-years-to-life sentence.

[Ono continues to perform, exhibit, and release recordings. She appears for, promotes, and supports many charitable, artistic, and humanitarian works and organizations around the world. She also works to preserve her murdered husband and collaborator’s legacy, having funded the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan’s Central Park in his memory in 1981-85, along with other memorials to Lennon.

[In 2005, as keeper of the Lennon flame, Ono was actively involved as a primary consultant to Lennon, a musical about the post-Beatles life of the rock songwriter with music and lyrics by Lennon and book by Don Scardino (b. 1949; retired actor; television director and producer).

[Ono made the whole Lennon catalog available to Scardino. The gatekeeper to the Lennon legacy, Ono retained final script approval and required the Broadway producers to present the completed script to her live in workshop format.

[The show went into previews on 7 July 2005 at the Broadhurst Theatre, opened 14 August to negative reviews, and closed on 24 September after 42 previews and 49 regular performances.]

At first, the audience-perpetrators are reticent and even polite, cutting bits from her sleeves and collar and waistband, then setting the shears back on the stage, as Ono stares ahead unperturbed. Eventually, though, an overzealous man saunters up and begins slicing off Ono’s slip with gusto, first cutting directly between her breasts, then snipping the slip’s arm straps and finally slicing all the way around her waist to reveal her bra. The audience titters with nervous laughter (“Don’t get carried away,” a female voice admonishes), while the artist herself begins to look uncomfortable, biting her lip, her eyes darting around. Only when the man clips Ono’s bra straps does the audience protest. “Stop being such a dweeb!” a female voice yells, breaking the offender’s spell; others boo and hiss. “Cornball,” a male voice declares. Ono’s eyes tilt upward as though imploring the heavens for assistance; she crosses her arms over her chest. But she perseveres, and the film ends before the performance does.

“Cut Piece” — in its enactment of public violence, escalating sense of dread and implication of the audience as voyeurs — was a pivotal work of feminist art and would inspire numerous others: Among them were Carolee Schneemann’s [1939-2019] provocative “Interior Scroll” (1975), in which the artist pulled a scroll inscribed with an excerpt from her book “Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter” (“If you are a woman … they will almost never believe you really did it” [Tresspuss Press, 1976]) from her vagina; and Marina Abramović’s [b. 1946] “Rhythm 0” (1974), in which the audience was encouraged to interact with the artist using any of 72 objects set on a table (a rose, a feather, a whip, a gun) while Abramović stood still. “Rhythm 0,” like Ono’s piece, reverses the usual artist-audience dynamic. “Instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give,” Ono has said of “Cut Piece,” “the artist gives what the audience chooses to take.” Abramović, who had a loaded gun pointed at her, put it more bluntly: “What I learned was that . . . if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.”

Viewing “Cut Piece” now, what struck me is how genuinely unsettling it remains. I watched the short film once, then again, floored by how relevant, how prophetic, it feels in our own cultural moment, when many of the long-held gains of feminism, both legal and cultural, seem on the brink of being lost forever. The reality most people took for granted merely a few years ago — that men and women were inherently equal, and that as a society we were collectively striving to remedy the ways in which we weren’t paid or treated as such — is being peeled away with alarming speed. This atmosphere is surely one reason we are seeing a resurgence of interest in feminist performance art of the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, much of it difficult, aggressive and surprisingly radical — certainly for its era but even now.

In the past decade or so, the defining trend among curators has been to shine a light on artists who were previously “overlooked.” Various groups who were once misunderstood, neglected or ignored have been excavated and exhibited — artists of color, older women artists, women of Abstract Expressionism and so on (though “overlooked” is, of course, itself a deprecating term). The “rediscovery-industrial complex,” as it’s been wryly termed, has now reached female performance artists, arguably sidelined in their day not only for the confrontational radicalism of their work — what Schneemann called the “considered disregard for the comfort of the audience” [The Obscene Body Politic (Carolee Schneemann Foundation, 1991)] — but because their particular art form was not salable, collectible or tied to the market in any way.

Ono, who has a new exhibition, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” opening at the Broad museum in Los Angeles next month [23 May-11 October 2026], is at the center of this reassessment, but she’s not alone. In July, London’s Tate Modern, where the Ono show originated, will mount a significant retrospective [Ana Mendieta, 15 July 2026-17 January 2027] of the work of Ana Mendieta [b. 1948], the Cuban American multidisciplinary artist who died in 1985 at 36 years old. The exhibition picks up where this winter’s comprehensive show at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York [7 November 2025-17 January 2026], “Ana Mendieta: Back to the Source,” left off, examining her short but prolific career through early paintings, remastered films, late sculptures and site-specific interventions in natural landscapes, which Mendieta documented with slides, photographs or film.

[Ana Mendieta died on 8 September 1985 after falling from her 34th-floor apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village. She lived there with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre (1935-2024). The circumstances surrounding her death were the subject of controversy.

[Prior to her death, neighbors heard the couple arguing violently and, after Mendieta’s fall, to which there were no eyewitnesses, Andre had scratches all over his face.

[During three years of legal proceedings, Andre’s lawyer described Mendieta’s death as a possible accident or a suicide. After a nonjury trial, Andre was acquitted of second-degree murder in February 1988. The acquittal caused an uproar among feminists in the art world, and remains controversial.]

Also this spring, Abramović, now 79 and the most influential performance artist still working — for “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA in 2010 [14 March-31 May], she sat staring at museumgoers for roughly seven hours a day over two and a half months, and has generally made testing the limits of human endurance her artistic pursuit — is presenting new and old work at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice [Transforming Energy, 6 May-19 October 2026], the first living female artist to have a major solo exhibition there. And her “Balkan Erotic Epic,” a four-hour dancing and singing extravaganza that mines Balkan folklore, will have its North American premiere at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in December [8-20 December].

[Before New York City, Balkan Erotic Epic (Abramović was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in the Balkans) has played in Manchester, U.K. (début); Barcelona, Spain; Bochum, Germany; and Berlin, Germany. Following New York, the project is scheduled to travel to Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Paris, France.]

Last year, Karen Finley [b. 1956], 70, the artist known for covering her body in chocolate to point out the degradation of women [The Return of Chocolate-Smeared Woman, The Flea Theater, 17 June-4 July 1998] — but even more so for suing the National Endowment for the Arts for denying her funding over “decency standards,” a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court [National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, et al. (1998); co-plaintiffs: John Fleck (b. 1951), Holly Hughes (b. 1955), Tim Miller (b. 1958), and the National Association of Artists’ Organizations; decided against the artists] — had a solo show at Freight + Volume gallery in Lower Manhattan [More Desperate Than Ever, 17 May-5 July 2025]. Other female performance artists had posthumous exhibitions at various major galleries in New York and Los Angeles: Schneemann (who often used her body as what she described as “visual territory” in transgressive pieces exploring female sexuality), Lee Lozano [1930-99] (whose most famous performance was a satirical inversion of feminism in which the singular artist avoided speaking to other women for 28 years [Decide to Boycott Women, August 1971 until her death]) and Hannah Wilke [1940-93] (who made stark work documenting her nude body’s deterioration from cancer). Curators have made it their mission to rescue subversive feminist performance work from the purgatory where it’s long dwelled. At a time when manosphere podcasters extolling the virtues of female subservience are increasingly influential in public discourse, the constitutional right to abortion has been overturned and social media is rife with a kind of emboldened misogyny I thought we’d left in a bygone era, what could feel more apt than a group of pioneering feminist artists who confronted exasperatingly similar issues in their own lives?

There are perhaps no two artists who were as misunderstood in their prime, and who are more worthy of a critical re-evaluation now, than Ono and Mendieta, who have more in common than one might think. Both lived in the shadows of famous men, both existed between two cultures and both made conceptual work about gender, power, vulnerability, dislocation, connection, ritual and transformation — work that was deeply female in its sensibility, and that was about navigating the fraught space between the female self and the larger world.

The Broad’s Ono show, through drawings, films, conceptual art, music, performance pieces, installations, photographs and archival ephemera spanning seven decades, illuminates her immense contributions to culture — some explicitly feminist, some implicitly so. Putting a finer point on this feels like a necessary corrective, as her Beatles-adjacent celebrity has often eclipsed her art career. “She used her work and her music to communicate a lot of important feminist messages,” Connor Monahan, Ono’s studio director, told me. (Ono is 93 and no longer gives interviews.) “But in a way, I don’t really think that’s been digested in society.”

Ono, who was born in Tokyo in 1933 and received classical music training as a child in Japan, told her father — a classical pianist turned successful banker — that she hoped to be a composer. He replied there were no great female composers. Instead, she’d become the first woman to study philosophy at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, lasting only two semesters before moving to New York to attend Sarah Lawrence College for three years and eventually finding herself at the center of the heavily male downtown avant-garde art scene.

Ono was making her early work amid the first stirrings of second-wave feminism; the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, combined with the publication of Betty Friedan’s [1921-2006; American feminist writer and activist] “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, lit the kindling of widespread discontent among postwar American women. In the 1950s and early ’60s, women were expected to suit themselves up in the suffocating corset of domesticity. Until 1974, unmarried women were often required to have a male co-signer when applying for a bank loan or credit card. Abortion was only legal in a handful of states by 1970, and sexual harassment, though pervasive, did not yet have a name. It’s this unnamed menace, I’d argue, that Ono so cleverly countenances in “Cut Piece.”

Two of her short films from this period (both made in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade) address feminist ideas. In “Freedom,” Ono, whose face is out of the frame, attempts to wrest herself free of the purple bra she’s wearing while a score by Lennon drones on in the background. “Fly” zeros in on a fly crawling over the rolling landscape of a woman’s naked body. Is the woman sleeping? Dead? The ambiguity is intentional. “This whole idea of a male society was based on the fact that women shut up,” Ono has said, “but shutting up is death, in a way. So we were always kind of pretending to be dead.”

In Mendieta’s case, the death was all too real — she fell from the window of her 34th-floor Manhattan apartment; her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was subsequently tried for murder and acquitted. Frustratingly, her tragic end has become the salient fact of her biography. Helen Molesworth’s [b. 1966; curator of contemporary art] popular 2022 podcast, “Death of an Artist,” investigated Andre’s suspected involvement, along with the couple’s tumultuous eight-month marriage; the actress America Ferrera [b. 1984] has announced plans to executive produce and star in an upcoming limited-series adaptation of Robert Katz’s [1933-2010] luridly titled 1990 account of the incident, “Naked by the Window.” To a maddening degree, Mendieta gets treated like the Sylvia Plath [1932-63; American poet and author; known for the 1963 semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar] of the art world. Her aesthetic obsession with blood and death and burials, with tracing the outline of her body in her iconic “Silueta Series” — a leitmotif of hers that unmistakably evokes a chalked crime scene — is said to prophesy her own death. Yet finally, with these shows, Mendieta’s mystical, powerfully haunting art gets its due.

Born in Cuba in 1948, she was sent to America with her sister at the age of 12. Mendieta made her most important work between 1972 and 1985: on creek banks in Iowa, where she lived in an orphanage, a boarding school and a series of foster homes as a child, then later studied at the University of Iowa’s avant-garde Intermedia M.F.A. program; in Mexico, where she visited pre-Columbian archaeological sites in the early ’70s; during a series of trips back to Cuba in the early ’80s; and in New York City, where she moved in 1978 and was welcomed by a community of feminist artists.

Mendieta’s varied oeuvre — influenced by Afro-Cuban religious rituals, Indigenous goddesses and the idea that a universal energy animates all life — includes paintings; photographs; works on paper; films of her pieces shot on Super 8, 16 millimeter and video; and sculptures she made at the American Academy in Rome, where she had her own studio for the first time, in the two years before her death. At Marian Goodman, there were drawings on leaves and an installation of black candles arranged in the shape of her body — called “Ñañigo Burial” (1976) [Ñáñigo refers to a member of a historic, Afro-Cuban, all-male fraternal organization], the installation was created by Mendieta for her first opening in New York [November 1979 at the A.I.R. Gallery (SoHo); Siluetas series]; it was lit the day I visited. But her signature pieces are her “earth body” works, as she called them, which are perhaps best described as ephemeral sculptures that straddle performance art, body art and land art, which Mendieta created using natural elements (mud, fire, feathers, flowers, blood, water, gunpowder) to carve, mark, burn or otherwise manipulate the earth. In “Imágen de Yágul” (1973) [“Image of Yágul,” a pre-Columbian Zapotec (indigenous pre-Columbian civilization that flourished from ca. 700 BCE-1521 CE in the Valley of Oaxaca in southeastern Mexico) archaeological site and former city-state], for example, she integrates her body into the landscape, lying inside an ancient Zapotec tomb, her naked form obscured by a gauzy spray of flowers; in other works, she inscribes her corporeal outline into the landscape by igniting it with gunpowder, say, or setting it on fire. Mendieta staged many of her pieces privately, capturing them in arresting short films and photographs, which are artifacts in their own right — “the afterimage of primordial remembrances,” in her words. Mysterious and intimate, her earthworks make you feel like you are being let in on a secret.

Ono and Mendieta have something else in common: Their work, as well as that of nearly all the female performance artists of this era, was marginalized, demeaned or slighted. When she died, Mendieta had no formal gallery representation and did not receive an obituary in The New York Times, though the paper extensively covered her husband’s murder trial. Reviews of the albums Ono released with Lennon were harsh: “A little of it goes a long way. Too long,” wrote the Times critic Don Heckman [1934-2024; New York Times pop and jazz music critic, 1969-73] of Ono’s half of the couple’s dual 1970 “Plastic Ono Band” releases, dismissing it as “wailing vocal sounds.” Her visual art was ignored almost wholesale until the 21st century.

Surely a primary reason for this dismissal of both women is that their work focused heavily on the female body. The body is the performance artist’s vessel, of course, but first- and second-wave feminist art, especially in the ’70s, was also engaged in “a rethinking of how we represent the female body in all its forms,” as the critic Lauren Elkin [b. 1978; Franco-American cultural critic, essayist, novelist, and translator] writes in “Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art” (2023). Some artists made work that was in-your-face, like Wilke photographing a series of topless self-portraits in which she covered her torso and face with labia-shaped pieces of chewing gum that looked like tiny scars [S.O.S. – Starification Object Series, 1974]. These artists were, as Elkin puts it, “harness[ing] the power of repulsion” to make their point.

Others employed the body as a vehicle for interrogating themes of displacement and identity, which were particular concerns for Mendieta as an exile. “I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette),” she wrote in an artist statement in 1981. “My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.” In her work, this return often means merging with the earth, as she does in the 1974 film “Grass Breathing,” where she lies beneath the sod, visibly inhaling and exhaling, like someone who has been buried alive. The three-minute silent film is claustrophobic, uncomfortable, intense, but also meditative, peaceful and almost erotic, masterfully taking the viewer through the full arc of emotions.

For these artists, the body, rather than being “mute” and “almost exclusively . . . a mirror of masculine desire,” as the [art] critic Jan Avgikos wrote in 1997, was, as it is in life, a site of liberation, agency, eroticism, pain. In a 2011 talk, “Regarding Ana Mendieta,” Schneemann, who was friends with the younger artist, said, “We have forgotten the danger, the dangers of depicting the explicit sensuous female body, we have forgotten how much hatred and resistance that inspired — rage, envy, domination.”

Have we? In “Moffitt Building Piece” (1973), Mendieta poured cow blood and viscera on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building, then filmed passers-by, none of whom intervened. In “Rape Scene,” from the same year, she loosely re-enacted the aftermath of a female student’s rape and murder, inviting an audience into her apartment to witness her half-naked, smeared with animal blood and tied to a table. Ono and Lennon also made a film called “Rape” (1969), in which the camera relentlessly stalks an unsuspecting young woman; it incriminates viewers, just as Mendieta’s films do. Yet Ono’s most notable project in this vein is “Arising” (2013), for which she invited women to send stories of harm done to them simply because they were female, accompanied by a photo of only their eyes. Numerous testaments hung in the installation — a bracing reminder of the dark side of the universal female experience.

Is it fair, in the end, to group these female artists together under a feminist banner? Mendieta resisted any such identitarian designation — though her work was clearly invested in feminist themes, and justice for her death has become an article of feminist conviction. Schneemann was not fond of what she called “the confines of essentialist theory.” Lozano, in her absolute spurning of other women, was rejecting all categories imposed on her. Ono, for her part, cared about the plight of women, but the cause was a tributary that fed into her larger humanist aims. “I am a woman, and my experiences produce my works,” she said upon the debut of “Arising.” “To me, feminism should be about understanding women and their condition, about expressing who they are and what happened to them. If you put it this way, you see how feminism does not concern only women but everybody as humans. Also, men.” Although these artists didn’t always readily embrace the label, had they known how shockingly essential their art would remain over a distance of 40, 50, even 60 years, they might have seen it differently.

[Essentialism, which Schneemann rejected, is the belief that things have an underlying, unchanging nature that defines what they are. It argues, for example, that gender differences are fixed, natural, and biologically determined, rather than shaped by culture or history. This becomes a simplistic excuse for discrimination, intolerance, and inequity.]

[In 1992, I was approached by Drama Review editor Richard Schechner (b. 1934) to do a profile of The Shaliko Company for the planned series.  For the better part of a year, I shadowed company director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), attending rehearsals for the various productions he was directing. 

[The company’s main project at the time was the environmental production of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven—originally called Going to Iraq (and returned to that title after the 1992 staging)—and I attended most of the rehearsals.  The production, at Theater for the New City in Manhattan’s East Village, from 17 September to 11 October 1992.

[Malpede had been working on Going to Iraq/Blue Heaven during the build-up to Desert Storm, and her response to the Gulf war had compelled her to write about it.  The playwright was, however, already contemplating another occurrence as the base of the drama: the death of artist Ana Mendieta. 

[For Malpede, Mendieta’s fate is emblematic of the position of women artists in America, and she found herself struggling with this subject when war broke out in January 1991.  Aria, a sculptor who serves as the play’s central character, is a sort of avatar of Mendieta.

[(It’s interesting to note that the actress who played Aria in Blue Heaven, Rosalie Triana (aka: Rosalía Triana. 1946-2023), had portrayed Ana Mendieta in June or July 1992 in Madre Selva by Alma Sanchez (b. 1947; aka: Alma Villegas) at the Galerie Lelong—which showed Mendieta’s work.)

[There are three posts on Rick On Theater that cover Blue Heven/Going to Iraq, and one more that’s an interview of playwright Karen Malpede.  For those interested, these are: “‘As It Is in Heaven’” (25 March 2011), “Blue Heaven (Going to Iraq)” in “Some Women Writers from the Archives” (10 July 2019), “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq) – Part 1” (11 May 2020) and “Part 2” (14 May 2020), and “An Interview with Karen Malpede (1992)” (5 November 2014).

[Amanda Fortini has written for the New York Times (including contributing frequently to T), the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, the Paris Review, New York, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Slate, and Salon, among other publications.  She’s worked as an editor at Mirabella, the New York Review of Books, and Slate, and has been the William Kittredge Visiting Professor at the University of Montana.  

[Her essays have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Political Writing (PublicAffairs, 2008) and Best of Slate (Atlas Books, 2006), and she was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award in 2012.  After several semesters as a lecturer in journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s Greenspun College for Urban Affairs, Fortini has contributed articles and essays on Las Vegas, including several for the New Yorker, and an acclaimed cover story for California Sunday.]