Julia Heyward: Voices of Many Voices

"In her throat the devil lives among angels"—so read a review of a 1975 performance given by artist Julia Heyward (b. 1949, US). [1] With her monologues and vocal experiments, she led her audience through extremes of emotion: the idiosyncratic orchestration of music, image and language moving—in its simultaneity of opposites—somewhere between a sublime descent beneath the brink of consciousness, psycho-sexual perversion, and the humorous mystification of the self. 

Despite the radical subjectivity of her voice and her profound influence on the New York underground art scene from the 1970s onwards, Julia Heyward's five-decade body of work has received little institutional recognition. Voices of Many Voices [2] now seeks to spotlight at least one defining aspect of her pioneering work: the manipulation of language and modulation of voice. This presentation, in parallel with Miracles in Reverse at Kunstverein Nürnberg - Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft (January 1–April 19, 2026), curated by Nele Kaczmarek together with Leonie Schmiese, will mark her first institutional solo exhibition outside of the United States.

Contemporary descriptions like the opening quote or attributions such as "frantic and exaggerated," "paradoxically hectic and dreamlike" or "apocalyptic" convey perhaps a vague impression of what performances like WAS HERE (premiered 1973, The Kitchen, New York), Shake Daddy Shake (premiered 1976, Judson Memorial Church, New York) or GOD/HEADS (premiered 1976, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) elicited in audiences—at a time when performance art was not yet established as an art form. Julia Heyward's theatrical, slapstick-inspired aesthetic drew on vaudevillian theater, yodeling, Mongolian throat singing, ventriloquism, onomatopoeia, and diverse forms of phonetic distortion. She utilized these techniques to explore, dissect, and expose linguistic material—and consequently, meaning itself—with the utmost precision. 

The artist describes her use of language as "convoluted, associative, delirious/didactic." With this, she established a form of writing that was highly affective, unusual for its time and, as is often quoted, "closer to the way we think than the way we speak." As a rejection of the primarily idea and concept-oriented approach that dominated within Minimalism and Conceptual Art at the time, Julia Heyward prioritized narration and emotion, which for her always included thematizing vulnerability, shame and trauma. The autobiographical, her own personality and recollections, always ran through her work. In an interview with RoseLee Goldberg she stated: "What makes this work more intimate, and more riveting, is that the distinction between the personality of the artists and the work presented is blurred in the performance." [3] But the media-critical examination of mass-media mechanisms and their respective language forms takes on a specific role here. Alongside autobiographical references, Julia Heyward also employed an impersonal, anonymized language that cited formulae of security rhetoric and propaganda, slang, cultural codes and text fragments from television and pop music, aiming for immediate emotional effect. The phonetic and linguistic double meanings in particular function here as a conscious space of provocation.

Especially through her relentless contestation of gender roles, classism, religious conviction and the physical and psychological consequences of abuse, Julia Heyward exposed the symbolic and structural entanglement of socially consolidated power structures—patriarchy, Christianity, and capitalism. Based on her own Presbyterian upbringing, ventriloquism—reinterpreted and employed as a medium of artistic criticism—offered an appropriate method of expression. She questioned the rigidity and dogmatism of religious and moral commandments and regulations, her unmoving face reflecting the formation and suppression of her own voice, yet at the same time, articulating political dissent.

Voices of Many Voices throws Julia Heyward’s earlier solo performances into focus and underscores their language-based and transdisciplinary approach. From the start, her performances integrated live music, video projection and later, interactive visuals that effortlessly migrate between spoken word, concert, and theater. Instead of restricting herself to a single medium, she continually and consistently translated her work into different formats, through which a continuous, media-defying and media-reflexive exploration of language, music and image arose.

Julia Heyward utilized newly available media technologies early on and realized multimedia projects such as Mood Music (premiered 1988, The Kitchen, New York, US), Miracles in Reverse (premiered 1996, Potsdam, DE) and 29 SpaceTime / The Gabriel Frequency (premiered 2014, Roulette, New York, US). These works, her long-format "video album" 360 (1981), as well as a range of collaborative music projects under the pseudonym Duka Delight on the New Wave and Post Punk scenes in New York, will be further expanded upon through tours and discussions as part of the accompanying program.

Collaboration and Publication
Voices of Many Voices features a scenography developed by artist and set designer Celeste Burlina as well as a three-part video and film program, curated by Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff Circuit City: Three Sequences on Video Art in New York, 1970s–1990s presents works produced in New York from the 1970s to the early 1990s by artists such as Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum, Jana Haimsohn, Joan Jonas, and Howardena Pindell, and reflects the artistic and political environment that shaped Julia Heyward’s artistic and musical practice.

Westfälischer Kunstverein and Kunstverein Nürnberg are collaborating closely on a comprehensive catalogue, which, in addition to introductory texts by the curators Nele Kaczmarek and Theresa Roessler on the exhibition's respective focal points, will also include contributions by Julia Heyward herself as well as previously unpublished archival material. The catalogue will be published in summer 2026 by Mousse Publishing.

Press Contact
For further details on the exhibition and events, image requests, or to receive viewing links and additional press materials, please feel free to contact our press office.

Director, Curator: Theresa Roessler
Assistant Curator: Vivien Kämpf
Project Assistant: Ellen Feldmann
Scenography: Celeste Burlina
Video- and Film Program: Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff

With special thanks to Mannan Atasoy, Kathy Brew, Sarah Cooper, Nell Donkers, Liz Glass, Jana Haimsohn, Christoph Hauf, Perry Hoberman, Nele Kaczmarek, Jay Sanders and Leonie Schmiese. 

[1] This is quoted from Peter Quehenberger’s review of Julia Heyward’s This Is My Blue Period in Innsbruck, AT, during which he was apparently impressed by Julia Heyward’s rage of vocal techniques.
[2] The exhibition title is borrowed from another review of This Is My Blue Period by Wendy Perron, published on the December 15, 1997 in The Soho Weekly News, in which she singles out Julia Heyward’s rapid changes between different voices/personas.
[3] RoseLee Goldberg (1976). Public Performance: Private Memory, in: Studio International, July/August, n.p.; document kindly provided by Liz Glass.