Sometimes referred to as the “Genius Grant,” the MacArthur Fellowship is a yearly prize awarded by the John and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation to between 20 and 30 individual US residents working in any field who have displayed “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” They receive $800,000 of unrestrictd funding over five years. Since the program’s 1981 inception, its recipients have included writers Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Ta-Nahesi Coates; literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.; jazz musicians Max Roach and Ornette Coleman; filmmaker John Sayles; playwrights Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anna Deveare Smith; and dozens of other deep luminaries of arts, letters, activism, and science. Among this year’s list of select honorees is artist, performer, singer-songwriter, and actor Justin Vivian Bond, who lives in Columbia County. While Bond is elated with the award, when asked if it’s true that they’re the first creative from the cabaret world to become a MacArthur fellow, they’re more on the ambivalent side. “I never like to use the word ‘first’,” they say. “It’s always a crapshoot when it comes to who’s really the first to do something. But if I am, that’s great.”
Called “the best cabaret artist of [their] generation” by the New Yorker, Bond, who is transgender, initially rose to fame with the Tony-nominated duo act Kiki and Herb before embarking on a solo career. They’ve received Obie, Bessie, GLAAD, Ethyl, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and other prestigious awards, and throughout their decades-long career they’ve created stage and studio work that is often intertwined with their passionate parallel efforts as a vocal LGBTQ+ rights activist. As a visual artist, Bond has seen their work displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the New Museum in New York, and at galleries in the US and the UK. For Bond, the merging of disciplines began during their childhood in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Finding Definition
“I did drawings and pastels, some watercolors and paintings in acrylic,” they recall. “I’d show my pieces at the county fair, and they won first, second, and third place. I’d buy 8×10 glossies of movie stars and I’d take them home and do drawings of them from the photos. I was in musicals starting at [age] 11 or 12, in local community theater. I was in the chorus for ‘The Sound of Music,’ and then I was in ‘Brigadoon,”Pajama Game,’ and others. I took singing lessons, and I sang in church, which had a very welcoming community. Hagerstown, though, is a very conservative town. Being a trans kid, although at the time the word trans didn’t even exist, I was lucky because I had great friends. But the day after I graduated high school, I hightailed it out of there.”
They headed north to Long Island, to study acting at Adelphi University. A mid-1980s turning point was seeing Judy Collins at Carnegie Hall. “She’d been my favorite singer from my time as a kid,” says Bond. “My sister had [Collins’s 1967 album] Wildflowers. I loved that she just refused to be defined by any one style. She did Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen songs, but she also did her own songs and songs from Stephen Sondheim and the avant-garde. That showed me how you can sing anything and still be the same person. You don’t have to do just one thing.” After graduating from Adelphi, Bond returned to Maryland to take dinner theater roles and serve as a maitre d’ at the Kennedy Center. Their next trajectory would take them west.
By the Bay
In 1988 Bond moved to San Francisco, where they discovered the city’s queer theater scene. “I felt like there was a place for me,” they remember. “I found out about Theater Rhinoceros.” (Established in 1977, it’s called the world’s longest-running gay and lesbian professional theater company.) A breakout role came when playwright Kate Bornstein cast Bond in “Hidden: A Gender,” which was based on the life of French intersex person Herculine Barbin. The play was an underground success, but Bond, nevertheless, didn’t want to stay locked into acting only. “I was on a date with a boy, and I told him that I wanted to be a cabaret singer,” Bond says. “And he said, ‘Oh, you should meet my friend.'”
The friend was musician Kenny Mellman, who shared Bond’s sense of humor, wide musical taste, and strong queer activist stance. The pair created a lounge act called Dixie McCall’s Patterns for Living, which elevated Bond within the queer community and soon saw them hosting the Pride parade finale show and the first San Francisco Drag King Contest. Their film debuts came with 1993’s Mod Fuck Explosion and 1994’s Fanci’s Persuasion not long after Bond and Mellman’s had act morphed into the punk cabaret duo Kiki and Herb, in which Bond played an over-the-hill, alcoholic lounge singer named Kiki DuRane. Kiki and Herb’s ever-changing live show saw Bond’s seemingly always-drunk character delivering rambling, hilarious monologues between the pair’s ragged renditions of everything from Broadway show tunes to songs by Nirvana, Britney Spears, Joy Division, and REO Speedwagon.
Back in the New York Groove
Bond returned to New York in 1994 for a residency in the West Village, working at a bookstore and doing telemarketing on Wall Street on the side. They convinced Mellman to come east and relaunch Kiki and Herb there, where, after a brief split, they became the new king and queen of the city’s colorful and edgy downtown performance scene, steadily building a following with shows at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame restaurant (a regular audience member was Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator and star, John Cameron Mitchell, who would cast Bond in his 2006 film Shortbus).
On the musical front, as Justin Bond, the artist appeared on 1995 and 1999 albums by San Francisco experimental musician Bob Ostertag, and soon Kiki and Herb were headliners at the Knitting Factory and holding down a weekly gig at Fez on Lafayette Street; in 2000 the duo released their first album, the kitschy-Christmas set Do You Hear What We Hear?.Bond’s dream was realized when the duo headlined Carnegie Hall in 2004, an event documented on Kiki and Herb Die for You: Live at Carnegie Hall (2005). “My mom took the bus up from Maryland to see the show and brought her friends,” Bond says. “I think after that she finally thought that I might not have made a mistake with my career choice.” Kiki and Herb collaborated with Debbie Harry, Sandra Bernhard, and others; appeared in the 2004 movie Imaginary Heroes; and played frequently in London, where Bond studied scenography at Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design. In New York, their show “Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway” ran for five weeks in 2006, and in 2007 they performed a holiday show at Carnegie Hall. Although Kiki and Herb would reunite several times later, by 2008 Bond and Mellman decided to retire the act. Bond went on to a vibrant and diverse solo career, working for several years as Justin Bond.
“Justin Bond is Close to You,” a show that saw Bond reinterpreting Karen Carpenter’s album Close to You, was staged for the 2007 Joe’s Pub in the Park series in Central Park and at Australia’s Sydney Opera House, and the 2008 show “Lustre” premiered at PS122 in New York and toured the UK. In 2009, they released the live EP Pink Slip, which was followed by the full-length debut Dendrophile, a Judy Collins-inspired folk-pop collection featuring a duet with UK singer-songwriter Beth Orton; Silver Wells, conceived as an homage to writer Joan Didion, appeared in 2012, the year that brought a starring role as Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis in “Jukebox Jackie” at LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club.
At Home in the Hudson Valley
Bond began a long relationship with Bard College in 2013, when they brought the long-running “Weimar New York” revue to the Spiegeltent during college’s annual BardScape Festival. The matchup went so well that Bond was invited to curate and emcee a cabaret season at the Spiegeltent in 2014 and would return to host and organize the series for the next five years, bringing in such A-list guest names as Alan Cumming, Suzanne Vega, Stephen Merrit, Lea Delaria, and Amanda Palmer, who calls Bond “a one of one performer: past magician, part den mother, part brainiac.” The period of performing and programming at Bard led to a teaching position at the college, although Bond, who staged “Jasmine and Cigarettes” at SummerScape 2024, has since moved on from the faculty.
“Viv is an extraordinary, pioneering artist, whose joyful practice defies and transcends categorization,” says the Bard Fisher Center’s artistic director, Gideon Lester. “Their relationship has been transformative for us. Their time as curator and host of the Spiegeltent infused that beloved space with a spirit of fierce glamor and queer resistance unlike anything I’d experienced. Viv is a national treasure, and we’re blessed to have them in our community.”
Currently, Bond divides their time between their homes in Columbia County and New York City, where their productive bond with venerated venue Joe’s pub continues with more shows there this year. “What other choice do I have?” they say when asked if they plan to keep on performing and not slow down. “I’m hardheaded, this is who I am.”
Justin Vivian Bond will perform in “Oh Well” at Joe’s Pub in New York on November 7-10 and in the holiday-themed “Flakes” at Joe’s Pub on December 12-15 and December 18-22.
This article appears in November 2024.
