It’s another one of those interviews for which your arts editor is running late. He’s jetting up the Thruway from Kingston, about 30 minutes behind his scheduled meeting, focusing hard on sticking to the speed limit lest he end up being even more late to his destination, with a few more points on his license to show for it. Fortunately, today’s subject is no stranger to patience. In fact, she’s made an art of it. One could even say she has the patience of a saint. Or at least that’s the goal.
“I’m going to make tea, want some?” offers Linda Mary Montano in her Saugerties kitchen as she gestures to a plate of biscuits on the 1950s Formica table. “Here, these are for you, too.” Then she starts the interview with a prayer.
A legend in the world of performance art, Montano is known for her extended endurance pieces, such as 1974’s self-evidently titled Three Day Blindfold; Seven Years of Living Art, which from 1984 to 1990 saw her wearing strictly monochromatic clothing while spending a portion of every day in a colored room of her home and listening to designated tones that corresponded to the energetic qualities of specific chakras; and Art/Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece), a collaboration with Taiwanese-American performance artist Tehching Hsieh that saw the two bound together for 24 hours a day for a year with an eight-foot piece of rope tied around their waists.
But for all the eccentric peculiarity of the performance art world, it’s her strict religious upbringing that Montano credits as the starting point of her nearly 60-year career. “I wanted to be a saint,” she explains. “In a way, Jesus was a performance artist, to suffer as much as he did. Traditional Sioux culture has the heyoka or sacred clown, who expose taboos and shadows of the subconscious. A ‘sin catcher.’ I wasn’t called so much to the performing life; I was called to heal medicinally through art.”
Catholic Discipline
Montano—who had moved away from the church and for decades worked as Linda Montano but added her middle name when she reverted to the faith—lives in the Victorian house she grew up in. “Saugerties was Timbuktu back then,” recalls the artist, who was born in 1942, about the early domestic life she shared with her siblings. “It was like Freedomland. My mother would open the back door, let us run out and play in the park or go to the public pool all day, and then we’d come home.” A descendent of Italian and Irish immigrants; her maternal grandfather was born on the ship that brought his family over from Ireland while her paternal grandfather founded the town’s iconic Montano’s shoe store, which in 2026 will celebrate its 120th year of operation. She was entranced by her grandmother’s folk art and her parents’ playing in a local theater orchestra (both sang, and her father played trumpet as well). But it was her elders’ devout Orthodox Catholic beliefs that initially moved her most. “My dad had a mystical vibration,” she recalls. “He was very serious about his beliefs; his soul just resounded with tenacity. And my Italian grandmother was a like a performance artist. She wore all black, spoke no English, and sat in the window of the Central Hotel all afternoon, saying her rosaries.”
After a year at the College of New Rochelle to prepare for the nunhood, Montano left to join the Maryknoll Sisters missionaries. But two years later, following a struggle with severe anorexia, she was back at New Rochelle, where a sympathetic faculty member steered her toward art. “She was my savior,” says Montano about the elder nun who introduced her to the creative curriculum. Graduating in 1965 with a degree in sculpture, Montano visited Italy, where she marveled at the sacred art, made religious-themed works of her own, and began externalizing her blossoming artistic essence. “I started to see myself as a walking sculpture,” she says.
By the Bay
Montano next attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to pursue an MFA. Her 1969 thesis project, titled The Chicken Show, was a display of nine live chickens in three minimalist cages on the roof of the arts building (the piece would serve as the inspiration for her first major performance, 1972’s Chicken Woman, and her recurring, humorous-but-provocative Chicken Dance series, which has had her dancing in full chicken costume in public). In 1970, she and her new husband, the photographer Mitchell Payne, moved to America’s mecca of freaky art, San Francisco, and it was there where she met influential figures like Terry Fox and her performing career began to lift off. She also met pioneering composer Pauline Oliveros, who became her romantic partner after she and Payne had become estranged. The tragic loss of Payne in a shooting spurred 1978’s landmark Mitchell’s Death, a stark black-and-white video performance that features a closeup of Montano’s face, festooned with acupuncture needles, as she recounts the incidents following the murder with a detached, droning delivery that sounds much like a bishop’s incantations.
Ever the searcher, she turned to Buddhism, living in a Zen monastery for three years before studying with Dr. Ramamurti Mishra at Ananda Ashram in Orange County, a mentorship that would continue for three decades. She’d said in 1980 that she was “retiring from art.” But, unlike most aspects of Montano’s tenacious life, her time away wouldn’t last.
Rope Trick
In the early ’80s she met Hsieh, who was revered for One Year Performance 1978-1979 (Cage Piece), a work for which he spent an entire year living in a 9-by-11-and-a-half-foot cage. “He was smart, intelligent, and the king of endurance,” Montano says. “I bowed to Tehching—I came out of retirement, basically.” The two soon embarked on Rope Piece, during which they slept in twin beds and maintained their pledge to never touch. The radical and now legendary performance is one of five of Hsieh’s year-long creations to be anthologized in “Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999,” an exhibition that opened at Dia: Beacon in October and is on long-term view.
Taking up residence in Kingston, Montano launched the Seven Years of Living Art performance, taught performance art at her self-founded Art/Life Institute, provided what she calls “Art/Life counseling” at New York’s New Museum, and began writing a series of yet-to-be-published (in physical form) books that include her Art/Life Handbook. She also entered another area of live performance work: imitating other personalities. In a spate of multiple, charming, and amusing three-hour street and gallery performances, Montano has appeared as Mother Teresa, Bob Dylan, and her friend Woodstock artist and musician Paul McMahon, who she met at party organized by Queens arts organization Franklin Furnace in 1986. “Linda asked if she could ‘be’ me in 2007, which was such a terrific validation and honor,” McMahon says. “When she does something, she’s all in. I mean, who says, ‘Sure, I’ll be tied to you for a year’? She’s a mystic.”
Prodigal Return
Montano moved back to her family’s home in the early 2000s to care for her ailing father. The return prompted her reembrace of Catholicism and subsequent efforts of taking of prayer requests to holy pilgrimage sites around the world and making of videos that explore the faith. These include projects about the 14th-century Saint Teresa of Avila and noted priest and exorcist Father James Lebar. Naturally, her advanced age has meant a slowdown in her performing schedule. “Right now, I’m preparing for the denouement—dying,” says the artist, now 83, with a playful smirk. “Endurance artists are outsiders who are privileged to be able to go into nasty, uncomfortable, dangerous, unspeakable, frightening places and bring back the goodies. I’ve been called to heal medicinally through my art. And my biggest and best performance is my community of friends and family.”
Still, she isn’t yet specifying a stopping date for her work. “I’m getting old,” says Montano, who lip-synced as Bob Dylan at last month’s O+ Festival in Kingston. “But this is all I’ve ever done. I literally can’t do anything else.”
This article appears in November 2025.
