Linda Mary Montano's Endurance Art and Spiritual Journey

Linda Mary Montano, an octogenarian endurance performance artist, lives in a home-shrine in Saugerties, New York, where she embodies her alter ego 'Chicken Linda' as a connection to the Holy Spirit. Born in 1942, she earned an MFA in sculpture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1967–69) and began performance art in San Francisco during the First Wave feminist art movement. She coined 'art/life,' influenced by Allan Kaprow, the Woman's Building, and California artists like Tom Marioni, Bonnie Shirk, Howard Fried, Paul Kos, and Terry Fox. Her guru, Shri Bhramananda Saraswati, encouraged her work. In 1977, after her former husband Mitchell Payne was murdered, she created the video 'Mitchell's Death,' now in MoMA and the Museum of Conceptual Art, Los Angeles. She later lived with artist Pauline Oliveros. Montano's practice is informed by Zen, Hindu philosophy, and Catholicism; she lived at Zen Mountain Monastery, studied with Saraswati for over 30 years, and was a Maryknoll Sister for two years. In 1981, she published 'Art in Everyday Life.' She collaborated with Tehching Hsieh on a year-long rope performance (1983–84) and then undertook 'Fourteen Years of Living Art' (1984–98), during which she gave palm readings at the New Museum, supported by curator Marcia Tucker. Montano describes her practice as an 'ego-buster.'