Julia Heyward: Miracles in Reverse

With Miracles in Reverse, Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft presents Julia Heyward’s (*1949, USA) first institutional solo exhibition in Europe. A central figure from New York’s 1970s and 1980s downtown art scene, Heyward developed a distinctive performative practice that combines throat singing, ventriloquism, spoken-word poetry, and sound effects. Her works address questions of belief systems, class, and gender. The exhibition brings together music albums, photographs, and videos in a scenography by Celeste Burlina.

Driven by the desire to reintroduce “narration, emotion, and light” into a period dominated by Minimalism and Conceptual Art, Heyward turned to the motifs and aesthetics of popular television, including Saturday Night Live. In her performances from the mid-1970s onward, projections, props, music, and text came together to form what she termed “live cinema experiences.” Her conceptual video album 360 (1981) anticipated the genre of the music video and ushered in the subsequent MTV era. Her performance style and keen sensitivity to timing, emotion, language, and emerging video technologies exerted a lasting influence on artists such as Ericka Beckman and Mike Kelley. Performing solo under the pseudonym Duka Delight, with the band T-Venus, she became part of the New Wave and post-punk scenes of the 1980s. Further musical releases followed in 1996 and 2017 with Miracles in Reverse and 29 SpaceTime/Gabriel Frequency (in collaboration with Perry Hoberman).

The exhibition is accompanied by a video and film program curated by Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff. The program brings together moving-image works produced in New York from the 1970s through the early 1990s by artists including Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, and Howardena Pindell, reflecting the artistic and political milieu that shaped Heyward’s practice.

Julia Heyward completed a BFA at Washington University in 1973 and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City, where she lived and worked until 2017, before relocating to Twentynine Palms. She received the Bessie Award for dance and performance in 1984 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; The Kitchen, New York City; the Daejeon Municipal Museum; the Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City; the South London Gallery; and the Bonner Kunstverein. In 2015, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco presented her first institutional solo exhibition.

On March 6, 2026, a subsequent solo exhibition by the artist will open at the Westfälischer Kunstverein. A monograph jointly published by both institutions will be released by Mousse Publishing in summer 2026. 

Curator: Nele Kaczmarek
Assistant Curator: Leonie Schmiese