Holly Hughes (born March 10, 1955) is an American lesbian

performance artist Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...

. She began as a feminist painter in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

but is best known for her connection with the NEA Four, with whom she was denied funding from the

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...

, and for her work with the Women's One World Cafe. Her plays explore sexuality, body images and the female mind. She is the recipient of several awards including the

Lambda Book Award Lambda Literary Awards, also known as the "Lammys", are awarded yearly by Lambda Literary to recognize the crucial role LGBTQ writers play in shaping the world. The Lammys celebrate the very best in LGBTQ literature.The awards were instituted i ...

and an

Obie Award The Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards originally given by ''The Village Voice'' newspaper to theatre artists and groups in New York City. In September 2014, the awards were jointly presented and administered with the A ...

. She is a professor of art and design as well as theater and drama at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design.

Biography

Born in

Saginaw, Michigan Saginaw () is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the seat of Saginaw County. The city of Saginaw and Saginaw County are both in the area known as Mid-Michigan. Saginaw is adjacent to Saginaw Charter Township and considered part of Greater ...

, Hughes graduated from

Kalamazoo College Kalamazoo College, also known as Kalamazoo, K College, KC or simply K, is a private liberal arts college in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Founded in 1833 by Baptist ministers as the Michigan and Huron Institute, Kalamazoo is the oldest private college in ...

in 1977 and moved to

two years later to become a feminist painter. She worked as a waitress to support herself but felt unfulfilled, later writing: "Why had I moved to New York City to live in an even crummier apartment and do the same things that I was doing in Kalamazoo?" She saw a poster promoting a "Double X-rated Christmas party" to be held in the basement of a Catholic church. There she found lesbian women stripping, kissing booths, and a highly sexual atmosphere. She eagerly attended many such parties, became involved with the group and began doing theater with them because "that's what they were doing". Hughes' first performance at the Women's One World Cafe (Wow Cafe) in the early 1980s was a piece called "My Life as a Glamour Don't", about various fashion mistakes. She followed this up with "Shrimp in a Basket" and then her breakthrough ''Well of Horniness'' (1983). At the WOW Cafe, Hughes felt that she was able to "tell the stories she so desperately wanted to be told as a child." Hughes wrote, directed and performed in '' Dress Suits to Hire'' (1987).''Holly Hughes: Polymorphous Perversity and the Lesbian Scientist'', interview with Rebecca Schneider, TDR, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 171–83 Critic

Stephen Holden Stephen Holden (born July 18, 1941) is an American writer, poet, and music and film critic. Biography Holden earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Yale University in 1963. He worked as a photo editor, staff writer, and eventually be ...

commented, in reviewing the play, "While Ms. Hughes's more poetic writing recalls

Sam Shepard Samuel Shepard Rogers III (November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017) was an American actor, playwright, author, screenwriter, and director whose career spanned half a century. He won 10 Obie Awards for writing and directing, the most by any write ...

, the campy B-movie side of her sensibility shows her to be equally in tune with

John Waters John Samuel Waters Jr. (born April 22, 1946) is an American filmmaker, writer, actor, and artist. He rose to fame in the early 1970s for his Cinema of Transgression, transgressive cult films, including ''Multiple Maniacs'' (1970), ''Pink Flamin ...

's movies and

Charles Busch Charles Louis Busch (born August 23, 1954) is an American actor, screenwriter, playwright and drag queen, known for his appearances on stage in his own camp style plays and in film and television. He wrote and starred in his early plays Off-off- ...

's drag extravaganzas." Focusing on the subjects of sexuality, masturbation and Jesus, her plays usually explore issues that she confronted as a young woman in college. In 1990 Hughes earned national attention as one of the so-called NEA Four, artists whose funding from the

("NEA") was vetoed. In 1996, Hughes released perhaps her most famous and influential performances: ''Clit Notes''. In this piece, Hughes performs several roles: herself at different ages, her mother, and various lovers that she has had. Hughes uses her writing to explore herself and to understand the events that have shaped her life, often using her writing to escape from elements that she perceives as repressive. In 1998, Hughes co-edited an anthology of queer solo performance with David Roman called ''O Solo Homo:The New Queer Performance,'' which included her own ''Clit Notes''. A review by Don Shewey in The Advocate noted the cultural and sexual diversity of contributors. In February 2017 Hughes organized a D.I.Y. style cabaret-style series of performance events protesting newly elected Donald Trump's presidency entitled "Not My President's Day

These events which were organized by participants in over sixty cities including Ann Arbor, Brno, Czech Republic, Chicago, Brooklyn, Gateshead, United Kingdom, and San Jose raised funds for organizations such as

Planned Parenthood The Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. (PPFA), or simply Planned Parenthood, is a nonprofit organization that provides reproductive health care in the United States and globally. It is a tax-exempt corporation under Internal Reve ...

and the A.C.L.U. She "worked with artists across the globe to build a loose network of over 35 Presidents Day events spanning the U.S., Britain and Italy. Most of the events used some variant on the names "Not My President's Day" or "Bad and Nasty" (derived from President Trump's reference to "bad hombres" and his description of Hillary Clinton as a "nasty woman" during the presidential debates)." Hughes works as a professor at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design. In 2010, she received a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

Bibliography

*''Well of Horniness'' (1983) *''The Lady Dick'' (1984) *'' Dress Suits to Hire'' (1987) *''World Without End'' (1989) *''Clit Notes'' (1996) *''O Solo Homo'' (1998) *''The Dog and Pony Show (bring your own pony)'' (2010) *
Memories of the Revolution
The First Ten Years of the WOW Cafe'' (2016), with

Carmelita Tropicana Alina Troyano, more commonly known as Carmelita Tropicana, is a Cuban-American stage and film lesbian actress who lives and works in New York City. Career Tropicana burst on New York's downtown performing arts scene in the 1980s with her alter ego ...

and Jill Dolan

Biography

Bibliography

See also

References

Further reading