52 Performance art in New York City

ABC No Rio is a collectively-run non-profit arts organization on New York City's Lower East Side. It was founded in 1980 in a squat at 156 Rivington Street, following the eviction of the 1979-80 Real Estate Show. The centre featured an art gallery space, a zine library, a darkroom, a silkscreening studio, and public computer lab. In addition, it played host to a number of radical projects including weekly hardcore punk matinees and the city Food Not Bombs collective.

Joseph Ades, also known as the "Gentleman Peeler", was a well-known street peeler seller in New York City, United States.

Laura Phillips Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She became more widely known outside the art world when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.

Eric Bogosian is an American actor, playwright, monologuist, novelist, and historian. Descended from Armenian American immigrants, he grew up in Watertown and Woburn, Massachusetts, and attended University of Chicago and Oberlin College. His numerous plays include subUrbia (1994) and the Pulitzer-nominated Talk Radio (1987), both of which were adapted to film by Richard Linklater and Oliver Stone, respectively. He also starred as Arno in the Safdie brothers' critically acclaimed film Uncut Gems (2019).

The Bowery Poetry Club is a New York City poetry performance space founded by Bob Holman in 2002. Located at 308 Bowery, between Bleecker and Houston Streets in Manhattan's East Village, the BPC is a popular meeting place for poets and aspiring artists.

Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol is a work of performance art by American artist Emma Sulkowicz. Released on 3 June 2015, the work consists of a website hosting an eight-minute video, introductory text and an open comments section. The video shows Sulkowicz having sex with an anonymous actor in a dorm room at Columbia University in New York City. It was directed by artist Ted Lawson in early 2015, while Sulkowicz was in the final year of a visual-arts degree at Columbia.

Club 57 was a nightclub located at 57 St. Mark's Place in the East Village, New York City during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was originally founded by Stanley Zbigniew Strychacki and enhanced by nightclub performer Ann Magnuson, Susan Hannaford, and poet Tom Scully. It was a hangout and venue for performance and visual artists and musicians, including The Cramps, Madonna, Keith Haring, Cyndi Lauper, Charles Busch, Klaus Nomi, The B-52s, RuPaul, Futura 2000, Tron von Hollywood, Kenny Scharf, Frank Holliday, John Sex, Wendy Wild, The Fall, April Palmieri, Robert Carrithers, The Fleshtones, The Fuzztones, Joey Arias, Lypsinka, Michael Musto, Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Fab Five Freddy, Jacek Tylicki, and to a lesser extent, Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Collective:Unconscious is a non-profit corporation, founded in New York City in 1993, and incorporated in 1995. Originally based on Ave. B in Alphabet City, it moved to 145 Ludlow Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, in 2004 it relocated to Tribeca until July 2008.

Dance Theater Workshop, colloquially known as DTW, was a New York City performance space and service organization for dance companies that operated from 1965 to 2011. After a merger it became known as New York Live Arts

The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, sometimes simply called Plastic Inevitable or EPI, was a series of multimedia events organized by Andy Warhol in 1966 and 1967, featuring musical performances by The Velvet Underground and Nico, screenings of Warhol's films, and dancing and performances by regulars of Warhol's Factory, especially Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga. Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable is also the title of an 18-minute film by Ronald Nameth with recordings from one week of performances of the shows which were filmed in Chicago, Illinois, in 1966. In December 1966 Warhol included a one-off magazine called The Plastic Exploding Inevitable as part of the Aspen No. 3 package.

Karen Finley is an American performance artist, musician and poet. Her performance art, recordings, and books are used as forms of activism. Her work frequently uses nudity and profanity. Finley incorporates depictions of sexuality, abuse, and disenfranchisement in her work She is currently a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Food for the Spirit (1971) is a performance art piece and self-portrait series by American conceptual artist Adrian Piper, which was conducted, performed and documented in the summer of 1971 in her New York loft as she isolated herself and entered a disassociative phase influenced by her constant reading of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Spalding Gray was an American actor and writer. He is best known for the autobiographical monologues that he wrote and performed for the theater in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as for his film adaptations of these works, beginning in 1987. He wrote and starred in several, working with different directors.

#class was a month-long series of events at Winkleman Gallery in New York that took place between February 20 to March 20, 2010 organized by artists William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton. The exhibition combined social media and networking with a physical gallery space.

Piero Heliczer was an Italian-American poet, publisher, actor and filmmaker associated with the New American Cinema.

HERE Arts Center is a New York City off-off-Broadway presenting house, founded in 1993. Their location includes two stages specializing in hybrid performance, dance, theater, multi-media and puppetry in addition to art exhibition space and a cafe. Since 1993, HERE reports having supported over 14,000 artists and hosting approximately 1,000,000 audience members.

Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays.

Imitation of Christ is a conceptual art project and fashion label started by former American art students Matthew Damhave and Tara Subkoff. The project initially began as an art collective, evolving into a fashion line made up of entirely recycled pieces of clothing, which Subkoff and others hand-sewed. The group enacted "guerrilla"-style fashion shows, with models including Scarlett Johansson and Chloë Sevigny.

Improv Everywhere

Improv Everywhere is a comedic performance art group based in New York City, formed in 2001 by Charlie Todd. Its slogan is "We Cause Scenes".

The Kitchen is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary performance venue and art space located at 512 West 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It was founded in Greenwich Village in 1971 by Steina and Woody Vasulka, who were frustrated at the lack of an outlet for video art. The space takes its name from the original location, the kitchen of the Mercer Arts Center which was the only available place for the artists to screen their video pieces. Although first intended as a location for the exhibition of video art, The Kitchen soon expanded its mission to include other forms of art and performance. In 1974, The Kitchen relocated to a building at the corner of Wooster and Broome Streets in SoHo, and incorporated as a not-for-profit arts organization. In 1987 it moved to its current location.

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club is an Off-Off-Broadway theatre founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart, African-American theatre director, producer, and fashion designer. Located in Manhattan's East Village, the theatre began in the basement boutique where Stewart sold her fashion designs. Stewart turned the space into a theatre at night, focusing on the work of young playwrights. La MaMa has evolved during its fifty-year history into a world-renowned cultural institution.

The Living Theatre is an American theatre company founded in 1947 and based in New York City. It is the oldest experimental theatre group in the United States. For most of its history it was led by its founders, actress Judith Malina and painter/poet Julian Beck. After Beck's death in 1985, company member Hanon Reznikov became co-director with Malina; the two were married in 1988. After Malina's death in 2015, her responsibilities were taken over by her son Garrick Maxwell Beck. The Living Theatre and its founders were the subject of the 1983 documentary Signals Through the Flames.

The Magnet Theater is an improvisational comedy theatre and improv school in New York City.

Ann Magnuson is an American actress, performance artist, and nightclub performer. She was described by The New York Times in 1990 as "An endearing theatrical chameleon who has as many characters at her fingertips as Lily Tomlin does".

Erin Markey is an American writer, comedian, and performance artist based in New York City. Markey's work combines elements of cabaret theater and comedy and often incorporates stories of their childhood in the Midwest. The New York Times has described Markey variously as "hilariously sociopathic" and as having "a cult following as an alt-cabaret star with swaggering confidence and off-kilter sense of humor."

Below is a list of musical artists, bands, and groups that have performed on the television series MTV Unplugged.

Mattress Performance (2014–2015) was a work of endurance/performance art which Emma Sulkowicz conducted as a senior thesis during the final year of a visual arts degree at Columbia University in New York City.

Strawberry Fields is a 2.5-acre landscaped section in New York City's Central Park, designed by the landscape architect Bruce Kelly, that is dedicated to the memory of former Beatles member John Lennon. It is named after the Beatles' song "Strawberry Fields Forever", written by Lennon. The song itself is named for the former Strawberry Field children's home in Liverpool, England, located near Lennon's childhood home.

Jennifer "Jen" Miller is an American performer, actress, writer, painter, director, preacher, and poet from Manhattan, New York City. In 2002 Miller was named the Village Voice's "Best D.I.Y. Go-Girl" in the category of "Over 21".

Tina Trachtenburg, known by her stage name Mother Pigeon is a street performance artist in New York City. In a typical show, she arranges an art installation of hand made soft sculptures representing pigeons and other urban wildlife while she sits among them. The art is for fun and to promote animal rights for pigeons, rats in New York City, and other animals. Her exhibitions are intended to improve the reputations of animals who are "maligned" and "overlooked".

Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." In 2012, Myles received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow, which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life. Myles uses they/them pronouns.

Robert John Burck, better known as the Naked Cowboy, is an American actor, singer, songwriter, writer, adult performer and street performer, best known for singing regularly in New York City's Times Square. Burck is also a regular in the streets of the French Quarter during the New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He wears only cowboy boots, a hat, and white briefs, with a guitar strategically placed to give the illusion of nudity.

New York Live Arts is a movement-focused arts organization in New York City that serves as the home of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. The building was formerly the home of Dance Theatre Workshop, with which the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company merged 2011 to form New York Live Arts.Its activities encompass commissioning, producing, and presenting works of dance, performance and music, together with allied education programming and services for artists. Live Arts is located in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood. Its building features a 184-seat theater, rehearsal studios and offices.

Klaus Sperber, known professionally as Klaus Nomi, was a German countertenor noted for his wide vocal range and an unusual, otherworldly stage persona.

The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is a nonprofit organization in Alphabet City, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It is a bastion of the Nuyorican art movement in New York City, and has become a forum for poetry, music, hip hop, video, visual arts, comedy, and theater. Several events during the PEN World Voices festival are hosted at the cafe.

The Peoples Improv Theater (PIT), also known as the PIT, is a comedy theater and training center in New York City, founded by comedian Ali Farahnakian in 2002. Shows combine improvisational comedy, sketch comedy, stand-up, theater, and variety. Each show is hosted by a combination of "house teams" of comedians hired by PIT and by outside comedians.

Performance Space New York, formerly known as Performance Space 122 or P.S. 122, is a not-for-profit arts organization founded in 1980 in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan in an abandoned public school building.

The Performing Garage is an Off-Off-Broadway theater in SoHo, New York City. Established in 1968, it is the permanent home of the experimental theater company originally named The Performance Group that morphed in 1980 into The Wooster Group, and their primary performance venue.

The Real Estate Show was a squatted exhibition by New York artists' group Colab, on the subject of landlord speculation in real estate held on New Year's Day in a vacant city-owned building at 123 Delancey Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City.

Ariana Reines is an American poet, playwright, performance artist, and translator. Her books of poetry include The Cow (2006), which won the Alberta Prize from Fence Books; Coeur de Lion (2007); Mercury (2011); and Thursday (2012). She has taught at UC Berkeley, Columbia University (2013), The New School (2013), and Tufts University (2014). Reines has been described by Michael Silberblatt of NPR's Bookworm as "one of the crucial voices of her generation." She describes the subject matter of her work as "bearing witness to the search for the sacred in the 21st century."

Barbara Rubin (1945–1980) was an American filmmaker and performance artist. She is best known for her landmark 1963 underground film Christmas on Earth.

The Soho Repertory Theatre, known as Soho Rep, is an American Off-Broadway theater company based in New York City which is notable for producing avant-garde plays by contemporary writers. The company, described as a "cultural pillar", is currently located in a 65-seat theatre in the TriBeCa section of lower Manhattan. The company, and the projects it has produced, have won multiple prizes and earned critical acclaim, including numerous Obie Awards, Drama Desk Awards, Drama Critics' Circle Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize. A recent highlight was winning the Drama Desk Award for Sustained Achievement for "nearly four decades of artistic distinction, innovative production, and provocative play selection."

Theater for the New City, founded in 1971 and known familiarly as "TNC", is one of New York City's leading off-off-Broadway theaters, known for radical political plays and community commitment. Productions at TNC have won 43 Obie Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. TNC currently exists as a 4-theater complex in a 30,000-square-foot (2,800 m2) space located at 155 1st Avenue, in Manhattan's East Village.

The Times Square Show was an influential collaborative, self-curated, and self-generated art exhibition held by New York artists' group Colab in Times Square in a shuttered massage parlor at 201 W. 41st and 7th Avenue during the entire month of June in 1980. The Times Square Show was largely inspired by the more radical Colab show The Real Estate Show, but unlike it, was open 24hours a day, 7 days a week, in what was then a Times Square full of porno theaters, peep shows, and red light establishments. In addition to experimental painting and sculpture, the exhibition incorporated music, fashion, and an ambitious program of performance and video. For many artists the exhibition served as a forum for the exchange of ideas, a testing-ground for social-directed figurative work in progress, and a catalyst for exploring new political-artistic directions.

Unsilent Night is a musical composition and participatory performance art piece by American composer Phil Kline which, since its creation in 1992, has been performed around the world annually in December. In the performance of this composition, volunteers carrying boomboxes and other music players parade through the streets of the participating city, presenting an ambient cacophony of recorded bells, harps, and electronic instruments composed by Kline. Considered Kline's most popular work to date, performances began in the New York City neighborhood of Greenwich Village and have since spread to 124 cities around the world, including the United States, Canada, Europe, Oceania, Africa, and Asia.

The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre is an online American improvisational theatre and training company founded by the Upright Citizens Brigade troupe members, including Matt Besser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, UCB had locations in the New York City neighborhoods of Hell's Kitchen and the East Village, and on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. UCB was located in Chelsea West 26th Street location from April 2003 until November 2017, after which it moved to Hell's Kitchen, 555 West 42nd Street in December 2017. The second NYC theatre located in the East Village opened in 2011, and the Los Angeles expansion started in 2014.

Alok Vaid-Menon is an American writer, performance artist, and media personality who performs under the moniker ALOK. Alok is gender non-conforming and transfeminine and uses singular they pronouns.

Steina Vasulka and Woody Vasulka are early pioneers of video art, and have been producing work since the early 1960s. The couple met in the early 1960s and moved to New York City in 1965, where they began showing video art at the Whitney Museum and founded The Kitchen in 1971. Steina and Woody both became Guggenheim fellows: Steina in 1976, and Woody in 1979.

The Velvet Underground was an American rock band formed in New York City in 1964. The original line-up consisted of singer/guitarist Lou Reed, multi-instrumentalist John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, and drummer Angus MacLise. MacLise was replaced by Moe Tucker in 1965, who played on most of the band's recordings. Their integration of rock and the avant-garde achieved little commercial success during the group's existence, but they are now recognized as one of the most influential bands in rock, underground, experimental, and alternative music. The group's provocative subject matter, musical experiments, and often nihilistic attitudes also proved influential in the development of punk rock and new wave music.

The Wooster Group is a New York City-based experimental theater company known for creating numerous original dramatic works. It gradually emerged from Richard Schechner's The Performance Group (1967–1980) during the period from 1975 to 1980, and took its name in 1980; the independent productions of 1975–1980 are retroactively attributed to the Group.

The Youth International Party (YIP), whose members were commonly called Yippies, was an American youth-oriented radical and countercultural revolutionary offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the late 1960s. It was founded on December 31, 1967. They employed theatrical gestures to mock the social status quo, such as advancing a pig as a candidate for president of the United States in 1968. They have been described as a highly theatrical, anti-authoritarian and anarchist youth movement of "symbolic politics".