"Everything you ever wanted in a lesbian performance artist and less..." Los Angeles Times

Performance artist and playwright Holly Hughes has a flair for telling outrageous stories of everyday lesbian life, touching off controversy and challenging complacency at every turn. Her combination of poetic imagery and political satire maps the troubled fault lines of identity, and places her work at the center of America’s culture wars. The two-time Obie Award winner returns to Los Angeles with new work in the key of canine, plus greatest hits from Preaching to the Perverted and Clit Notes. Hughes has performed at venues across North America, Great Britain and Australia, including the Walker Art Center, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Guggenheim Museum, the Yale Repertory, the Drill Hall in London, and numerous universities. She has published two books: Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler and O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance.

Organized by Brighde Mullins.

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Artist's bio

Holly Hughes is an internationally known performance artist. She is also a narrative storyteller in the tradition of Mark Twain: a bona fide American pundit and homegrown humorist…except that Hughes is also a lesbian icon. Her one-woman shows are disturbing and hysterical.

She is the recipient of two Obie awards for excellence in off-Broadway theater for her plays Dress Suit to Hire (1988) and Clit Notes (1990). Hughes gained national notoriety in the early 1990s as one of the "NEA Four," artists who received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 but whose grants were then cancelled. Hughes and the other artists--Karen Finley, John Fleck and Tim Miller--sued the NEA not only to have their grants reinstated but also to change the wording in the charter. Some of Hughes' plays, such as Well of Horniness (1983) and The Lady Dick (1984), delve into the contradictions within the lesbian community itself. They are ribald satirical romps that deftly explore such deeply lesbian themes as butch/femme relationships and mistrust of bisexual women.

While Hughes has forged a career in performance art, she also is a professor in the art and theater departments at the University of Michigan and an activist for lesbian issues. In the current climate of political conservatism, where progressives seem to be taking an increasingly silent stance in the culture wars, Hughes' unabashed brass is needed. Her work reminds us of Artaud’s injunction that art should “contain terror, should turn away from moralizing and the category of the uplifting…”