African American Performance Art Archive

NOTE: This portion of the archive is under construction.

Clifford Owens is one of the key figures in contemporary Black performance art. He often uses photography, text, video, visual performance and community interaction to elicit underlying social dynamics across lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. (… read the rest of Clifford Owens’s bio)

Owens prefers not to be called a “performance artist,” but an artist who sometimes makes performances. Nonetheless a thick strain of his work in all of these media takes up and reconfigures difficult questions stemming from the history of performance art – questions about shared responsibility, liveness, documentation, and embodiment. (… read more about Clifford Owens’s work)

Projects: images and audio of Clifford Owens’s work

Bibliography: writing on and by Clifford Owens