Performance artist Linda Mary Montano is a Saugerties native whose family owned Montano’s shoe store. After concentrating her career in major art centers like New York City and San Francisco since the 1970s, she has returned to spend her “golden years” in her hometown. Her local audience-participation events in recent years have included performing The Psalms R Us in the Reformed Church for the 2018 ShoutOut Saugerties festival, a Laugh-Cryathon at the Saugerties Library in 2019 and another titled Art/Life/Death 78th BirthdayArama in 2020, just before the pandemic struck.
In addition to her performances embodying such characters as Chicken Woman, St. Theresa of Avila, Mother Theresa and Bob Dylan, Montano is known around the world for her signature “endurance art” pieces, which can last from three days up to more than a decade. In 1983, she spent a year continuously bound by an eight-foot rope to Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh. She spent seven years giving five-minute counseling sessions to random people each day in the window of the New Museum in New York. She spent another seven years dressing in a different specific color and dwelling in a room of that color for each year. Going blindfolded for days at a time has been a recurring fascination.
These self-imposed restrictions, intended to open her chakras, evolved out of having spent two years of her youth training to become a nun. After many years of exploring Eastern spirituality, living in a Zen monastery and an ashram, the artist more recently found herself drawn back to the Roman Catholicism of her childhood as a language for creative expression. “Self-discipline can never become self-punishment or it will backfire. If you need to be a priest, and are a woman, then make rules that are non-consequential, creative and fun and proceed to break them so you can forgive yourself,” Montano has written.
In the mid-1970s, Montano’s estranged husband, photographer Mitchell Payne, was killed in a gun accident, and she turned to art as a healing modality, beginning with the film Mitchell’s Death. This theme has guided her artistic explorations for the past 45 years, and became even more of a focus after she took care of her dying father: “Performance for me is medicine; performance for me is healing. I was a selective mute as a child — I never talked. My families were not talkers, so I learned through performance and acting and acting out how to communicate my needs, my terror, my trauma and my unhappiness — self-designed Art Therapy.”
From October 14 to November 19, Montano’s hometown will honor her life and career with a monthlong schedule of special events and two exhibitions at Emerge Gallery and the Lamb Center. ShoutOut Saugerties is co-sponsoring the “Art = Healing” celebration. There will be a blindfolded pilgrimage, a reimagining of the Stations of the Cross liturgy, an interactive screening of Montano’s latest film, art therapy discussions, artist talks, guided meditations and a variety of performances.
The Montano marathon gets underway with an Opening Reception from 3 to 5 p.m. on Saturday, October 15. Lin Lerner will recite a Tibetan prayer at the Lamb Center at 41 Market Street. A procession of dancers and musicians, including Julia Haines on accordion and Fre Atlas with her troupe of Rosendale drummers, will lead a blindfolded Linda Mary Montano as Mother Theresa through the Newberry Artisan Market art display to the Emerge Gallery and its “Stations of the Cross” exhibition.
Montano will remain blindfolded for the week, and fellow Saugerties artist Jennifer Zackin will also wear a blindfold while creating a new sculpture. It will be installed at the Lamb Center on Saturday, October 21, where there will be a performance from 3 to 5 p.m. of chicken dances by Sharon Penz and Celeste Graves, accompanied by accordionist Julia Haines. This event will conclude with the removal of Montano’s blindfold.
The “Stations of the Cross” show at the Emerge Gallery at 228 Main Street was curated by Montano to update each of the 14 traditional Stations to suggest contemporary societal issues such as bullying, feminism, gender, body dysmorphia and working conditions. The 14 artists who contributed new works to this show (besides a crucifix designed by Montano herself) include Carrie Dashow, Joan Ffolliott, Josepha Gutelius, Lynn Herring, Nina Isabelle, Veronica Lawlor, Molly Mackaman, Elin Menzies, Denise Orzo, Tracy Phillips, Rebecca Ray, Angela Gaffney Smith, Bonnie Marie Smith and Jennifer Zackin. Participating artists will discuss their works from 3 to 5 p.m. on Sunday, October 22 at Emerge Gallery.
The Lamb Center and the Saugerties Library will host the “Art = Healing” exhibition of works honoring Montano’s career or interpreting the principle of Art = Healing. Participating artists include Lucinda Abra, Robin Adler, Kim Alderman, Pesya Altman, Timothy Anderson, Olga Belsito, Ana Bergen, Claudia Berlinski, Vian Borchert, Celine Cardwell, Michael Doyle, Patti Gibbons, Celeste Graves, Josepha Gutelius, Rebecca Ray H, Joan Harmon, Mikhail Horowitz, Susan Kaplow, Laura Kopczak, Edith Korzan, Jim Mackey, Kathleen MacKenzie, Kate Masters, Gilles Malkine, Ann Morris, Grey Ivor Morris, Will Nixon, Steve Parisi-Gentile, Eileen Power, Joan Reinmuth, Janet Roberts, Matt Rogerson, Jesse Sanchez, Evelyn Saphier, Christina Tenaglia and Linda Turner. They will discuss their work in an Artist Talk from 3 to 5 p.m. on Saturday, October 28 at the Lamb Center.
At 5 p.m. on Wednesday, November 8, Upstate Films’ Orpheum Theatre at 156 Main Street will host an interactive screening of Montano’s latest film, What Could Go Wrong, followed by a conversation led by art history professor Beth Wilson. Additional events include “Finding and Losing Ourselves through Art,” a discussion with art therapist Nina Schmidbaur, LCSW, at Washburn Studios at 8 Washburn Terrace beginning at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, October 15; and a meditation/performance series offered twice at the Lamb Center, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. on two successive Sundays, November 5 and 12. The latter will include a Laughter/Crying Meditation led by Linda Mary Montano, Will Nixon’s Wounded Crow and Mikhail Horowitz, Celeste Graves and Gilles Malkine performing Coleridge’s poem “Xanadu.”
The Closing Reception for “Art = Healing: In Praise of Linda Mary Montano’s Life in Art” will take place from 3 to 5 p.m. on Sunday, November 19 at the Lamb Center. Paul McMahon and Linda Mary Montano as Bob Dylan will sing with the Universal Mother; there will be a grief healing ceremony with Adriana Magaña; and Nina Isabelle and Brian McCorkle will lead a final chicken dance.
For more details about Saugerties’ monthlong tribute to Linda Mary Montano, visit http://bit.ly/2uaTLlO and www.shoutoutsaugerties.org.
Join the family! 
