Guillermo Gómez-Peña

A ritual performative lecture involving an epic performance
poem/chronology and utilizes literature as a means to recapture memory.

Multiple Journeys: the life and work of Gómez-Peña is a performance lecture that invokes text and historical photographs to chronicle the performance art practice of post-Mexican writer, artist and activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. By tracing his family life as well as his past 35 years in performance, visual and literary forms, the artist discusses his work in context to the larger evolution of the field as well as to the main political and social events of the times.

For the past 15 years, with the archival assistance of Emma Tramposch and other colleagues, Gómez-Peña artist has been going through the process of cataloging his extensive personal collection of original photographs, slides, videos, audio-art, books and ephemera documenting his interdisciplinary arts practice. In the process they have come across unique historical materials that lend perfectly to this form of artistic and educational presentation. In keeping with the hybrid spirit of his work, he has translated his archives into this one-hour performative audio-visual lecture.

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Journalist: “What do you do when a writer or a curator wishes to deport you from performance art history?’”
GP: “You mean someone like Rosalee Goldberg?…You write yourself back into it on your own terms. Chicanos taught me that.”
Journalist: “What do you do avoid being typecast and confined to a one liner in the history of art?”
GP: “You have to constantly remind the art world that you work in multiple terrains and that some of them are invisible to them.”

Biography

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and artistic director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, his performance work and 21 books have contributed to the debates on cultural, generational, and gender diversity, border culture and North-South relations. His art work has been presented at over one thousand venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, USA Artists Fellow, and a Bessie, Guggenheim, and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT).

with Technical Assistance by Balitronica and funded by the Athenaeum Award (Knowledge Exchange)