High Performance: A 2-Year Conference (2025–2027)

Performance Art Museum, Highways Performance Space, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and 18th Street Arts Center present High Performance: A 2-Year Conference (2025–2027).

A multi-institutional initiative dedicated to High Performance, the Los Angeles-based magazine that was the first international art publication devoted exclusively to performance art, and its enduring influence on contemporary art and society. The initiative will develop programming that examines, celebrates, and documents the magazine’s history while extending its influence to a new generation of performance artists, scholars, and educators.

“Steven [Durland] and I are very excited about this project. We worked on High Performance with love for 20 years, and we are thrilled to find that it still holds interest for artists and scholars,” states High Performance founder Linda Frye Burnham, "The time has come for performance art to rise again.”

High Performance: A 2-Year Conference will celebrate its launch on Saturday, January 31, 2026, together with founders Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland and High Performance artists featured on various covers, including Paul McCarthy, Nancy Buchanan, Bob & Bob, May Sun, Richard Newton, Los Angeles Poverty Department, Sisters of Survival, Stephen Seemayer, and Suzanne Lacy, with a year-long project, reimagining of her performance Cinderella in a Dragster (1976), as featured on the first High Performance cover in 1978.

The series will span exhibitions, performances, discursive programs, and archival activations, including the following highlights:

December 2025 – PAM inaugurates the two-year conference with Cover to Cover, a 24-month reading series that explores all 76 published issues, cover to cover. A drop-in reading group open to the public on the second Saturday of each month, beginning in December 2025 and taking place at PAM’s Education Center.

January 2026 – 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica hosts magazine founders Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland for rare in-person programs, along with the official launch of the initiative on January 31st, featuring artists from High Performance covers. And High Performance: Low Drama, a series of exhibitions and readings around The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena: An Anthology from High Performance Magazine 1978-1998 (Thinking Publicly).

April 2026 – The GRI presents “Performance, Protest, and Preservation: The Legacy of High Performance magazine,” on April 3rd, a scholarly and creative convening on performance art contextualizing the legacy of the magazine within global art history, featuring performances by Susan Silton and Linda Mary Montano with Tehching Hsieh. Panels will be led by Sarah Russin, Jenni Sorkin, and Erica Wall. A Call for Papers is available at pamuseum.org.

June 2027 – LACE stages a performance series in conjunction with the organization’s survey exhibition of works by Cassils.

July 2027 – Highways transforms its performance and gallery space in Santa Monica into an immersive, multi-room environment for various performance and installation works inspired by the publication.

Education and university partners include the Art, Design & Architecture Museum and the Department of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine; California State University, Dominguez Hills Art Gallery; Stanford University; Performance Studies Graduate Certificate at the University of Southern California; University of California, San Diego; and the Department of Art and Art History at the University of California, Davis.

Advisory Committee Members (as of 12/16/25) include Amelia Jones, Asher Hartman, Cheri Gaulke, The Dark Bob, Jenni Sorkin, Jerri Allyn, John Tain, Liz Hirsch, Mara McCarthy, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, and Rossen Ventzislavov.

About High Performance
High Performance was a quarterly arts magazine founded in Los Angeles in 1978 and published through 1997. Its editorial mission was to provide support and a critical context for new, innovative, and unrecognized work in the arts. Over the years, High Performance was a leader in viewing the arts in the larger context of contemporary life, examining how the arts contribute to addressing social and cultural concerns, and also how those concerns impact the arts. In 1994, High Performance received the Alternative Press Award for Cultural Coverage from the Utne Reader and was nominated three other times for the same award. Linda Frye Burnham served as the magazine’s founding editor from 1978 through 1985. Steven Durland was the editor from 1986 through 1994. Durland and Burnham coedited the magazine from 1995 to 1997.

In January 1978, LACE opened its doors at 240 S. Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles on the third floor of the Victor Clothing Company Building. That same year and in the same building, High Performance published its first issue. In 1982, Astro Arts was founded as the nonprofit publisher of the magazine, which later evolved into the nonprofit 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica in 1988. The following year, Linda Frye Burnham and Tim Miller founded Highways Performance Space and Gallery. The last issue of the magazine was published in 1997. In 2005, Jenni Sorkin organized High Performance: The First Five Years exhibition at Bard College. The exhibition traveled to LACE, and in 2006, the Getty Research Institute acquired High Performance Archives. The Performance Art Museum was founded in 2023 to advance the visibility, legacy, and scholarship of artists working in performance.

High Performance: A 2-Year Conference has received support from the Terra Foundation for American Art for its creative convening: performance, protest, and preservation at the GRI on April 3, 2026.