QUESTIONS FROM NICOLÁS DUMIT ESTÉVEZ RAFUL TO LINDA MARY MONTANO, 2018

1. Nicolás: Dear Linda, I thank you for agreeing to do this Q&A. I just came across the Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (S.L.A.A.) book at Esalen Institute's free library, and I thought immediately about your 12 steps. Last year I was reading from the AA’s Twenty-Four Hours a Day. I was not surprised about you being ahead of the times, and so I am eager to ask about art and addiction before anyone else does?

Linda: first I want to post the 12 STEPS right here, right now.

12 STEPS OF PERFORMANCE ARTISTS ANONYMOUS  by  LINDA MARY MONTANO

(All steps to be read in a whisper or slurred voice.) 

1. We admitted that we are powerless over Performance Art and that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. We came to believe that an art greater than ours could restore us to sanity.

3. We made a decision to turn our will and loves over to the care of the Higher Artist as we understood that artist.

4. We made a searching and fearless inventory of our past performances.

5. We admitted to the Higher Artist, ourselves and another person the exact nature of our past performances.

6. We were ready to have the Higher Artist remove all of the defects of our art/life.

7. We humbly asked the Higher Artist to remove our shortcomings.

8. We made a list of audiences we had offended and critics we had outraged and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. We made amends and apologies except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we had foolish performance ideas/concepts, we promptly admitted it and didn't do that performance.

11.  We sought through silence to improve our contact with the Higher Artist as we understood this Artist and asked to know this Artist's will. We also asked for the opportunity to do their Concept, not ours.

12. We tried to tell other performance artists about these principles and practiced them in every aspect of our art/life. 

Nicolás: Can one get addicted to art the same one can get addicted to sex, love, alcohol, gambling, shopping, and cell phones? The list is endless.

Linda: When art is not a call from the heart and soul to the hands and mind, it becomes a commodity and game of one up-woman-ship. And what follows is an addiction. What is an addiction? Let's see what Wikipedia says: Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences. Despite the involvement of a number of psychosocial factors, a biological process – one which is induced by repeated exposure to an addictive stimulus – is the core pathology that drives the development and maintenance of an addiction. The two properties that characterize all addictive stimuli are that they are reinforcing (i.e., they increase the likelihood that a person will seek repeated exposure to them) and intrinsically rewarding (i.e., they are perceived as being inherently positive, desirable, and pleasurable). Addiction is a disorder of the brain's reward system which arises through transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms and occurs over time from chronically high levels of exposure to an addictive stimulus (e.g., eating food, the use of cocaine, engagement in sexual activity, participation in high-thrill cultural activities such as gambling, etc.).

And may I add, exposure to the 'high thrill cultural activity " of making PERFORMANCE ART??? High thrill events produce chemicals like dopamine and tons of other good inner juices because the artist does and does and does these high thrill performances not for ART'S-SAKE  but for the pleasure that comes from the dopamine and good-feeling other chemicals. So art becomes not a language via culture BUT A DRUG.

2. Nicolás: What was in your mind and heart at the moment of developing the 12 Steps of Performance Artist Anonymous?

Linda: Why not? There is alcoholism in most families, mine included and I found this a transforming "way" to address the shame of that. Plus, I always loved the economy of the AA-12 Steps and how related they are to the 10 Commandments and the fact that the meetings are FREE and HIGHER POWER centered PLUS they have a very high success rate. I belong to a prayer group that meets in a 12 STEP meeting room and their rules and regs are 12 STEP based so that might be a reason?  Not sure, but I do know that I was becoming a PERFORMANCE ARTAHOLIC and needed some self correction, some art commandments, some bridles on my art-greed and inclination to do more, perform more, publish more, Facebook my successes more, be liked by other artists more, be more and more art-brilliant on a daily/hourly basis. 

3. Nicolás: Can you talk about your use of the term Higher Artist in your steps? I know that AA and S.L.A.A. talk about a Higher Power, whom I understand as God.

Linda:  How totally self centered/conceited/filled with pride: how arrogant we can become as artists, as miniature GODDESS/GODS parading around Performance Art festivals and Documentas and Museums, having been sent pre-paid plane tickets and given hotel suites (not really suites) for a week or more!! How tempting it is to become self-satisfied and arrogantly privileged JUST because Performance Art is a language of the Divine and the/me artists sometimes think they/I am/ are Divine!!!! (We are, but that's a whole other theological chapbook, not meant for here.) So by talking about Higher Power in my 12 STEPS, I am reminding myself to be careful because Performance Art is SO, SO, SO  hot and global and wanted and thirsted after and commodified and taught  in Universities and Instagrammed to ad nauseam...that it is easy to get into and under the spell of  POWER AND HOW GREAT NOT THOU BUT HOW GREAT  I ART!!! (AM)!!!!!

4. Nicolás: When you talk about performance in your 12 steps, does this term refer to life, as in performing life itself or does this refer specifically to performance art?

Linda: They spill over into each other. Right now staged performance art is the sought after must have. When life becomes enough, we will find a way to commodify and conquer  "life." We are carnivores and conquerors of all we think, do say, dream, create. We muscle through. Plus we will find ways to make lots of $$$$$$$$ from it. From life, that is.

5. Nicolás: From my own personal experience I can say that art can get out of hand. Evidence of this manifests in one's health or dis-ease, relationships or breakups, and state of mind and heart. Are your steps a reminder of the imbalance in which art can thrust us?

Linda:  Why not? Why not burn out? And worse, health-wise?  We performance artists deal with and "court" danger, self-mutilation, stress, ritual, storytelling, social sculpture, art-life, endurance, androgyny, objectification, consciousness, body politics, exaggeration, fear, chance, the unpredictable, vulnerability, audience interaction, autobiographical disclosure, self-harm, chaos, risk, subversion, shamanism, magic and beauty. Wouldn't that stress out the best of us? 

6. Nicolás: I am trying to close my eyes and see how humbleness and art can come together. There is so much emphasis on competition and might in the arts, at least in the art market, which is certainly a pyramid. Only a handful are meant to make it to the top. Can art and humbleness coexist?

Linda: Even if we were to fly to a desert hut, a hidden cave, a private hovel, a solitary cellar, a storage container with the door locked we would still COMPETE! Only then it would be with ourselves. How many prayers did I do today?  Oh SHIT!! I only meditated 18 hours, I guess I will have to stay up all night and I know that...……….(fill in the blank) has probably meditated (made more art) than me, so I better up my game. Human nature. Art nature. And don't get me started on art magazines/grants/ money/exclusion-inclusion and performance art!! 

7. Nicolás: Can you tell me about a performance that you did in the past for the College Art Association and for which you publicly apologized to another person?

Linda:  I'm going to be 77 years old in January 2019 and for the love of God, I have NO IDEA what you are talking about, Nicolás. Plus my website is untranslatable so I couldn't find that reference even if you paid me for doing this interview!!!!!!!!!!!  ((Now that we are talking freely and transparently about  $$$$$$$$.  LOL).

8. Nicolás: Sanity. After two decades of working in the arts, the word sanity sounds like a balm. Where do you find sanity? You have been working for more than four decades, so I can only imagine all of the experiences that you must have had, good and not so good ones. 

Linda: Age is a great healer. I have developed a NO BUTTON because I just don't have the energy or interest or ability to DO, DO and more DO. I say NO to lots of things and I do what I can, not what I think will bring me a stand up audience response!  As a result, a new level of appreciation has set in. That is, I am soooooooo happy I can do the little that I can do that I am appreciating art-life MORE! It is now TANTRA-ART- TIME for me. That is I DO it slow, do it easy, am nurtured by it and ENJOY! It is NOT about the limelight or the power that comes with recognition or the applause from the world of art. Aging and art are a good  combo. Plus once you really look old, people stop vibe-ing competition because they know I am going to die sooner than them so they are more respectful!!!!!

9. Nicolás: Artists as creators. This is a concept that I am struggling with. If everything in the multiverse has been created, what is our role as artists? I keep thinking about the Higher Artist, the one from whom all has emerged or emanated. I have recently come to understand of my role as a mere conduit for this Higher Artist or Power. What are your thoughts about this?

Linda: Maybe we will open that monastery some day????  Get us a grant, find the building????

10. Nicolás: I want to return to the concept of art and addiction. Seriously. Sometimes I ponder about this and think about how art can be a cover up for some of the situations we have to face in life: illness, aging, older parents, financial issues, mental health, depression. Art, like work or alcohol, can become an escape to coming face to face with some of the challenges just mentioned. Can you please help me see through this question?

Linda:  Anything that keeps me focused on the PRESENT MOMENT  and out of the prison of my totally messy/harmfully vile/dangerous/sad/toxic past, is a good thing. A good escape. That's why I love art. It does that. It provides a HERE-NOW focus. Just be careful so that the escape doesn't become a prison too. More of us should go and live in India and Japan where PRESENCE is honored. Where art and life are ONE. We are western trained into pushing and conquering!!!! There, there is not the same kind of PUSH. More of a non-muscled melting. 

11. Nicolás: I wonder what happens when we have a healthy relationship with art? How does this art look? How does it feel?

Linda: It looks like when someone moves to a small town and isn't recognized for the ARTISTE that they are!!!!!!  It is a hoot!

12. Nicolás:: I thank you so very much for your teachings, your love, your visions. You have been a source of inspiration for me as well as for generations of artists. You have taken so many risks and you continue to reinvent yourself over and over in ways that talk about healing. I was wondering if you can end this Q&A with an art prayer? Much love to you, Nicolás.

Linda:  "The main function of the shaman is to restore balance in their community. Shamans conduct blessings, rituals of protection, hunting magic, rain making divination. They also cure sicknesses that have spiritual causes. Shamans are also the caretakers of traditional culture, with their knowledge of ancient traditions. Their counsel has been sought throughout ages." AMEN. From a source I forgot to note. 

This Q&A was first published online, as well as as a printed card by Elizabeth Foundation Project Space, as part of As Far as the Heart Can See, 2018

NIcolás: Linda, after attending your performance Mask On/Mask Off, at the Gershwin Hotel in Manhattan I was wondering if we should invite the reader to wear a wig, to tease their hair or to do their hair in a different style before engaging in this piece?

Linda: Great idea. Now everyone put on your extensions!!!!!!!!!!!

Nicolás: For nearly a lifetime you have been performing so many characters. Can you tell us where they come from?

Linda: I was a "silent selective mute" as a child. That term I made up....but I remember staying in silence forever. My family was very quiet and silent, My Italian grandparents didn’t talk much because they didn’t know English or didn’t like America maybe? Not sure. And my other grandparents who did speak English were quiet also. So I watched everything very closely and when TV first came to the house and people were talking, I learned how to talk from all of those characters I imagine. Señor Wences... very difficult, very easy. Remember? And then there was the church where I spent hours in silence, very happily, dreaming of how to become a saint.

Nicolás: Can you give us some suggestions for allowing hidden aspects of our personas to come to the surface and to take on a physical shape? By this I mean to become a tangible character that can be explored privately or publicly?

Linda: Everybody does this already. We play around with friends and talk differently, fooling around, using accents and personas with them. I would say, the next time you get in a tough spot, have one of your personas work it out for you. Also see who is in your unconscious, lurking there, and give that persona a voice and task.

Nicolás: Why Masks? Mask on and off? Are you implying that we wear masks in our day to day?

Linda: We are always performing and sometimes a persona will take over and confront or stay too long inside us and the idea of seeing this dance as a mask dance is helpful to me. No mask is a bad mask. Each mask is take-on and take-offable. On our death bed, there is only a death mask.

This Q&A was first published with the Queens Museum and the New New Yorkers Program as part of Life as Material For Art and Vice Versa , 2009

Linda Mary Montano and Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Linda: CHILDREN LIKE TO PLAY OUTSIDE IN BARE FEET AND SCREAM A LOT, WHEN FILLED WITH JOY.

Nicolás: Growing up, freedom for me translated into having the opportunity to work hand in hand with water, sand and salt, and mud, to shape and reshape, with a great deal of autonomy, my socio-cultural-spiritual-emotional worlds.

Linda: WHEN PEOPLE ARE 30 THEY THINK THEY HAVE TO BUY HOUSES, CARS AND TECHNOLOGICAL EQUIPMENT WHILE TAKING CARE OF FAMILIES. 

Nicolás: What tying a stone during rainy days did was to symbolically castrate Saint Peter, and hence force him to stop urinating on us. We were not concerned with acid rain but with copious golden showers!

Linda: AT 40, UNLESS PEOPLE GO TO THE GYM, THEIR STOMACHS GET BIG.

Nicolás: I presently understand guilt in connection to sin, and the sin I am getting at is one linked to the perpetration of oppression, whether racial, sexual, economic, or ecological.

Linda: WHEN PEOPLE ARE 50, THEIR FRIENDS START TO DIE AND SOMETIMES THEY CRY AT NIGHT IN BED.

Nicolás: Personal sacramental associations with nature emerged from my grandmother’s former beliefs in how observing absolute silence on Good Friday put one in contact with a boundless source of Holy Water. 

 Linda: AT 60, SOME PEOPLE JOIN CHORUSES AND SING OTHERWISE THEY TELL FAMILY SECRETS OVER BEERS IN A BAR.

Nicolás: During Annie Sprinkle’s and Elizabeth Stephens’s workshop I found myself in the English countryside, together with a group of amazing Eco-Sexuals, having non-genital, breath and energy orgasms with the moon, the stars, and the sky.

Linda: AT 70, INSOMNIA OR INCESSANT SLEEP OBLITERATES THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN DAY, NIGHT AND DREAM.

Nicolás: Can you imagine a church where priestesses, priests and people in the community read from a bible that does not have words, per se, but that is entirely made from leaves, roots, veins, wrinkles, moss, feathers, skin, eggs, clouds, magma, rocks… serving as a platform inviting one to embrace biophilia; one’s love for life.

Linda: AT -------------, PEOPLE DIE SOMETIMES ALONE, SOMETIMES IN ACCIDENTS, SOMETIMES SITTING IN MEDITATION POSTURES.

Saugerties and the Bronx, New York, September 2013

Linda Mary Montano Interviews Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Linda Mary Montano interviews Nicolás Dumit Estévez about " the shared religion of their youth, Roman Catholicism, and its interface with nature, the Earth and current ecological concerns, issues and insights." Montano

Estévez grew up in a culturally diverse home rich in syncretic spiritual identities and beliefs; Montano was raised a strict Roman Catholic, was in a convent for two years and is presently a returned and practicing Catholic. They share struggles and successes in their spiritual practices that inform their lives and art. This interview is an attempt to open the door to further freedoms and birthrights.

Skype: ring, ring, ring.

Linda:  Hi, Nicolás. Good to see you.

Nicolás: How are you, Linda?

Linda: Good. Nicolás let's improvise and after I interview you on Skype, let's both feel free to add, subtract and totally re-create this interview so that we are both happy.

I will begin with a question that this topic raises for me when I think of kindness, the earth, guilt, fear and religion!

Does conservative religion leave room for the interpretation and treatment of the Earth as living, co-breathing “sentience;” or does the paradigm of strict religious adherence to law, rules, and the sin-fear template get collaged over the earth so that subsequent treatment of her might echo a punitive-suffering model which is not conducive to nurturing the planet as loving mother? Perhaps environmental carelessness and abuse might be a more accepted modus operandi of a culture that does not address joy and pleasure as birthrights. 

How did growing up in the Dominican Republic allow you to be guilt free?  I know that your story will help me let go of my attachment to my very medieval, early, misinformed religious/personal story that was suffering-based.

Nicolás: I can’t say that I ever was or that I am completely guilt free, but as a child I had freedom in how I related to spirituality and nature. Of course then we did not talk much about the environment or ecology. These were the mid ‘70s and the general perception was that the planet could provide one with endless goods. People talked about the exploitation of natural resources as a positive endeavor. Tourist resorts in the Dominican Republic were just beginning to be built. Beach sites, for example, were a “virgin” territory ready to be pimped by the travel industry.

I was raised in a home where there was a coming together of different religions. My mother and father were, to some extent, practicing Roman Catholics. We would attend mass once in a blue moon, but we were also involved with Afro-Caribbean spiritualities, and with unorthodox acts that were deemed as brujería, or witchcraft. However, talking about Vodou in the Dominican Republic of the ’70s was taboo. Broaching the subject exposed the classism and racism that Dominican society was so intent in burying deep into the ground. Vodou was seen as Black, which equaled poverty and intellectual backwardness. To this end, the eco-spiritual freedom I enjoyed as a child was inseparably tied to guilt, the guilt of being caught red-handed playing unconventionally with spirituality and nature. Yet, the mixing of Vodou with Catholicism was sometimes so imperceptible and so interweaved that it was difficult to draw a line demarcating the two. I must clarify that some of the rituals we performed might have been of European “pagan” origin.  One of these rituals entailed the use of a broom, which propped in a corner with sea salt crystals on its top was meant to push unwanted guests to leave one’s home at once. But back to your original question, freedom for me translated into having the opportunity to work hand in hand with water, herbs, salt, and similar materials, to shape and reshape, with a great deal of autonomy, my socio-cultural-spiritual-emotional worlds.

The Caribbean is a place where heavy rain can make surreptitious appearances, or where it can pour and pour, and pour and pour, non-stop for days on end. At times, at home, when we were dealing with persistent precipitations, and wanted the sun to come out, we would bring a stone from the outside and perform a peculiar action. It is important to note that, although, I learned this from my maternal grandmother, men as well as women participated in this performance. First of all, one would tie a stone with twine and then hang it from the ceiling. What this parasympathetic act did was to occlude St. Peter’s phallus, and hence force him to stop urinating on us. We were not concerned with acid rain but with copious golden showers! To me, actions like this speak of a fluid and fearless commingling of the Earth and spirituality.  The wet, the mucky, and bodily are not kept at bay, but are invited to come into the domestic temple embodied by one’s abode.

Linda: It sounds matriarchal and not disciplined by rules and regulations. You are so lucky that you had these animistic, surreal and shamanic phenomena in your environment as a child. But I am ALWAYS interested in the word guilt.

Tell me about guilt.

Nicolás: Guilt? I would say that the guilt informing my upbringing comes mainly from my own training in Catholicism as yours did. Guilt made itself evident, to name one example, in the passion-like images that emerged during Easter. An illustration is provided by the stories of trees, whose sapping transformed into bleeding. Can this image come any closer to the crucifixion? Can you imagine a forest of hemorrhaging crosses?  Metaphors of such sacrificial sorrow are not far distant from the current condition being lived by vast parts of our planet, which could be said to resemble an ecological Calvary.

I presently understand guilt in connection to sin, and the sin I am getting at is one linked to the perpetration of oppression, whether racial, sexual, economic, or ecological. Liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez talks about social sin as lack of human solidarity.

Linda: Sin as lack of solidarity is much better than sin as personal failure! Not to digress, but I can see where Liberation theology might name poverty as a great sin of misplaced solidarity via non-equal wealth distribution! In the Church, the wealth of teachings, rituals and visibility is consistently male. I would love to hear more grandmother stories.

Nicolás: Sacramental associations with nature emerge for me from my grandmother’s former beliefs in how observing absolute silence on Good Friday put one in contact with a boundless source of Holy water. That is, on Good Friday, Dominican water was Holy water, if one did something special.  In other words, remaining silent on this specific day allowed one to become a King Midas of some sort. However, instead of turning the world into gold, one’s silence and devotion imparted an imperceptible, but powerful change in water: one could drink glass after glass of Holy water, take a Holy shower, and rinse one’s soapy dishes with this sacramental liquid.  The beauty of this act resided in its ability to dismantle religious hierarchy and priestly mediation, and in giving one the possibility to imagine the sacred outside of the perimeter of the Church. On the other hand, I do wonder what happened after this Holy Water reached one’s kidneys or bladder?

Linda: We are so ready for this culturally: grandmothers giving teachings! Women artists doing this permission-giving are the radical eco-sex-dyad radicals, Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens.  I'm sure their CARE can resurrect our hurting planet from its wounds.

Nicolás: Annie and Beth’s radicalness resides in the acts of kindness and love toward nature they are committed to performing as part of their life as well as their artistic practice. The Eco-Sex field they are so keenly developing makes ample room for participants to shift personal paradigms about their relationship to one’s planet, and hence to ourselves. In my case, joining their workshop in the U.K. turned my world upside down for very good reasons, and brought my heart and intellect closer to the ground. All of a sudden I found myself in the English countryside, together with a group of amazing Eco-Sexuals having non-genital, breath and energy orgasms with the moon, the stars, and the sky. Or discussing openly our erotic exchanges with the grass we sat or took naps on. Expanding this experience into a broader context can have the positive repercussion of helping dismantle human supremacism over other beings, including the Earth. Annie and Beth's activist, artistic and theoretical premise of the Earth as our lover instead of our mother makes great sense, at the same time, it pushes one to reconsider outdated notions of motherhood. Mom is tired.

Linda: So is religion! Do you think religion is necessary? What can good-religion offer the world?

‪Nicolás: Religion means community to millions and millions of people. For this reason and because of its commitment to bringing about a just world, religious institutions should be at the forefront of activism. Likewise, they should be a locus fostering the production of forward-thinking political, social cultural and ecological paradigms. Although nowadays my personal focus is on spirituality, which I see as the essence of religion, I am open to the possibility of more religion, but of the most progressive nature.

Linda: We could learn from our theologically astute planetary neighbors, that's for sure. I'm drawn to Hinduism, Jainism, Native American and Buddhist theologies.

Nicolás: Linda, can you imagine a cathedral whose walls are stacked with progressive books from all major disciplines and areas of knowledge, where beings other than “humans” are allowed to roam freely beyond St. Francis’ day when animals are blessed? Can you imagine a church where communion takes the shape of a luscious mango or a handful of juicy blueberries? In this church priestesses, priests and people in the community read from a bible that does not have words, per se, but that is entirely made from leaves, roots, veins, wrinkles, feathers, skin, eggs, clouds, magma, rocks…, hence serving as a platform inviting one to embrace biophilia, one’s love for life.

Linda:  Your voice would be most likely echoed by WOMENPRIESTS who now number over 145 in 2013. These brave females weather excommunication by the Catholic Church to follow the whisperings of the HOLY SPIRIT who directs them to equalized service and priesthood. What a great sacrifice and what bravery because excommunication is totally bone-shaking for anyone raised Catholic! These are women who are kicked out but still want to be there. Thankfully, WOMENPRIESTS are more interested in being bathed in love and natural sharing; your juicy berries comment most likely would resonate well with them!  What is needed is a re-thinking, re-doing of the patriarchal model and misogynistic racism which holds mother Earth captive. It's the men's fault, I say! What about men and ecology?

Nicolás: I agree with you. I very much welcome your proposition. It is time for dramatic socio-political-spiritual-economic-cultural changes in regard to the patriarchal systems that have ruled our planet as a whole. Personally, I am in the midst of confronting the patriarchal and colonial structures that informed my upbringing. I see this conversation as part of this healing process.

Linda: What is REALLY wrong with the world from your perspective?

Nicolás: Many of us want too much. All of these wants and greedy desires become overwhelming for our planet, because in the end their pursuit has serious ecological repercussions.

Linda: In the spirit of not wanting, let's end now with a prayer for the Earth. You went to Union Theological Seminary, right?  Aren’t you a priest?

Nicolás: I attended Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, but I have not pursued ordination. And you are right Linda, I like the idea of keeping this conversation short because by talking about ecology on Skype we are consuming energy! We are actually burning coal as we talk. 

Linda: And by using our computers to add, subtract, multiply and divide this interview, we are clogging the airwaves, no doubt.

Nicolás:: Prayer: "Here we are, Linda and Nicolás, on Skype, talking about the Earth, talking about this being we are part of, talking about this living and dying entity with whom we are called to commune on an ongoing basis.  And here we are on our computers, after our initial Skype meeting, editing this interview.  We promise to love the Earth and to treat her not only as mother, but also as lover. We are from Earth and we will return to nurture it with our flesh and bones, the flesh and bones we received from her."

Linda: And because I am a want-to-be priest, I add St. Juliana Norwich's Prayer: "ALL IS WELL, ALL IS WELL. ALL MANNER OF THINGS ARE WELL." Amen.

Nicolás: Amen

Saugerties and the Bronx, New York, August 28, 2013, 3:00 PM

This Q&A was published in 2015 as part of Ecosexuality, edited by Serena Anderlini-D’onofrio and Lindsay Hagamen.

Linda: What a great opportunity! A chance to be a transgressive twin again, this time not with a rope but with HOPE, binding me invisibly and happily to Nicolás Dumit Estévez for 3 days, 3 hours a day in his Bronx.

About 6 months ago, Nicolás invited me to help him celebrate his incorporation into Bronxdom and I suggested we perform a "HOPE/PIECE/PEACE". This is not the time or place to suggest the 563,000 reasons why hope is our most valuable personal, political, social commodity so I defer to conceptual art reasons to explain why my first idea referenced recycled plastic bags.... I said to Nicolás, "Let's stand on the streets, 3 hours a day, for 3 days and let folks write their hopes on plastic bags with markers. Then we hang the bags in the gallery." It seemed like a good concept coming from an ex-nun who had sworn herself to poverty and simplicity, right?

We agreed and then a few months later he contacted me, we talked and he said, "Do you want to scan the HOPES written on bags and show the scans instead of plastic bags?" Nicolás's sweet voice can convince me of anything and I let go of the simple, green, bag endurance and we agreed. Scan the bags. It seemed like an aesthetic and good fix and raised the level of plastic to fine art, even though it did involve technology, paper and a larger time commitment.

And then a few months later we talked and Nicolás raised the bar! "Let's let them write their hopes on us," he said. "We can wear white clothes!!!!" So in the tradition of our art mentors: Manzoni, Klein, Yoko Ono, Shirin Neshat and a litany of others; in the tradition of the cave painting ritual of signage as symbol, we ventured into Bronx-land and endured while wearing our white art suits. And as walking, talking, transgressing, living sculptures we invited elders, African Muslims, 12 year old school children, folks on the streets, subways, taxis and buses to STOP! DREAM! SHARE LIFE AND HOPE outside the traumas of the daily news and our individual unimaginably complex everyday dramas.

Nicolás, we play good art/life together,

Linda Mary Montano

This piece was written in response to HOPE: A three-day performance by Linda Mary Montano in collaboration with Nicolás, and as part of Born Again, A Lebanese-Dominican Dominican York is Born Again as a Bronxite. Commissioned by The Bronx Council on the Arts.

This essay is a summary of places where Linda Mary Montano and I traveled during the performance Hope in 2011

Nicolás: Linda Mary Montano has the gift of purging art of any of the unnecessary frills that might prevent it from overlapping with life. She strips her ideas to the bare bone, while my tendency is the opposite. Nonetheless, given our unique visions and particular approaches to art and life, several months ago we both found ways to agree to spend three days in my hometown, The Bronx, inviting people in the borough to share their hopes with us. 

Our day one of the performance: Riverdale 
I am hesitant to travel from Longwood in the south, South Bronx to a fancy community closer to Manhattan than to my neighborhood. However, I feel responsible for faithfully following our pre-planned performance schedule. Linda and I ride with a taxi driver who does not have a clear picture of our exact destination. Riverdale seems so far removed from Longwood. In Riverdale, you have the impression of things being almost perfect, so there is not a single candy wrapper on the sidewalks. We spend an hour in this part of The Bronx in conversation with a thoughtful host who brings Arabs and Jews together for breaking bread. Linda and I leave the place with two brown bags containing falafels and with several hopes written on our backs. On the number 1 train we meet a group of teenagers and a handful of adults who inscribe their hopes on our clothes. At the Hub, a few blocks before reaching home, we encounter a passerby named Boobie. She writes on both of our hoodies. I vividly remember the woman in a wheelchair, not too far from where we meet Bobbie, who asks Linda to spell for her: “I hope to get my kids back.” In St. Mary’s Park, Linda and I unpack our falafels and eat them as we talk about hope. 

Our day two of the performance: Riverdale: West Farms Road and the Grand Concourse
Linda speaks with a group of students at an intermediate school about the subject of our quest: hope. The class is half-asleep, but eventually the children interject our questions with answers. A sick boy, who is comforted by a young teacher, regains his health surprisingly quickly. He smiles and joins the discussion. Children think twice before writing on our clothes, but soon enough they overcome their hesitation, as the adults in the room invite them to venture into art-life, to live a moment artfully, to break rules. On the other hand, while extremely polite, the staff at the school looks at the twins in white, Linda and I, with suspicion. Linda’s orange wig disrupts their monotonous, clerical routine. Art flirts with productivity.

Later that same day, seniors at a building not too far from the Zoo wait for us in a small room. As a result of some miscommunication, they expect us to give them t-shirts on which they can paint. Instead, they meet a middle-aged man and a woman of their own age who initiate a conversation on hope. The dialogue becomes heated as some of the seniors voice their thoughts about the lack of jobs for young people and the government’s interests in building jails instead of improving the economy. I promise one of them that I will spread the word about her request to get free tickets for the group to attend a play at a Bronx theater. I translate for six seniors called Las Comadres, the Godmothers. They write their hopes on our clothing in Spanish. Traveling from the seniors place in West Farms to Longwood, we watch a rowdy group of teens spill out onto the street outside the McDonald’s at the Prospect subway stop. We exit the scene swiftly. The police patrols the corner. 

Our last visit that evening is to a Muslim Center on the Grand Concourse 
Angelika Rinnhofer, one of my former students at the Transart Institute comes from upstate New York to watch the performance. Shoes off. Linda and I climb up the stairs to meet some of the members. Some of the hopes they write match those written by many others, like “peace,” or address common needs in the borough: “Keep The Bronx Clean and Safe.” I ask myself whether these should be a hope or a right. We live in one of the wealthiest cities in the world, The Bronx included. The chanting on the lower floor of the mosque counteracts the weight we carry on our clothes: so many hopes.

Our day three of the performance: Hunts Point 
A Community Development Corporation called The Point offers us a place where we are able to engage people at a women’s health festival. What a blissful ending. Linda and I meet inspiring teens, graffiti artists and a friendly chef. We eat arroz con gandules and drink lemonade. We step outdoors where a man in a van stops to write his hope on my sleeve. Linda gets several tags on her legs before leaving the scene, and The Bronx, for good. I cross the Bruckner full of hopes spelled on my legs, arms and hoodie. One of my shoes reads “courage.” The performance ends, yet people’s hopes outlive our three-day action. 

“Linda, I hope that you come back to the Bronx. Thank your for your mentorship and for three unforgettable days where art and life met.” Nicolás

This piece was written in response to HOPE: A three-day performance by Linda Mary Montano in collaboration with Nicolás, and as part of Born Again, A Lebanese-Dominican Dominican York is Born Again as a Bronxite. Commissioned by The Bronx Council on the Arts.

This essay is about my long-time relationship with The Bronx, the place where Linda Mary Montano and I performed HOPE in 2011

Nicolás: Our first significant encounter was in the nature of a blind date. That was twenty years ago before IM, Skype or Facebook. I was combing The New Times classifieds searching for a job teaching art, as I had recently graduated after two years in art school, received my green card, and was eager to become a documented taxpayer. Moving from ad to ad, my eyes stopped on a call from the Bronx River Restoration Project for an art counselor for its summer program for children. At the time The Bronx was a place I had visited sporadically, so traveling by train from the Upper West Side, where I lived, to Fordham Road was in some ways no more than an urban excursion outside of the “center” and into the margins of “The City.” The job I found in the classifieds was mine for $8.00 an hour. Yet this was a deal that would eventually transcend its nature as simply employment to mark the beginning of my love affair with the only borough in New York City that is part of the continental United States. In 2004 I moved permanently from Manhattan (where I ended up after emigrating in 1991 from the Dominican Republic) to the mainland, The Bronx. I was no longer an islander.

“An All-American City” proclaimed the metal signs strategically placed at some of its points of entry. This is the All-American City to which I voluntarily relocated from a gentrifying Upper Westside, where no matter how many academic degrees I had, or how white-collar-like I dressed, many of my Euro-American neighbors would automatically link my “Latino” looks and accent to a job in the service industry. I was their porter, doorman or delivery guy. On the other hand, in the South Bronx, I would be perceived as another Latino luchando, struggling, in a “New York City” that up to this day fails to recognize the value of its northernmost borough or the contributions of its inhabitants. In this Bronx I would become a middle-age man, watch my art overlap with life more and more, and become aware of the role of politics in my artistic practice. Politics, I learned, was an unavoidable topic in a Bronx whose streets have been walked by Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta (now a saint), Jimmy Carter, and even Ronald Reagan, among others. Politics was an inescapable subject in the Bronx, more so in the South Bronx and in the south South Bronx, where the lack of economic and educational opportunities puts most of its residents at odds with those living in other parts of the City. In this Bronx I gradually became involved in politics, while consciously avoiding turning my art into a purely activist pursuit. Nonetheless, the question remained for me as to whether or not to make art that would go beyond just commenting on economic disparity, simply examining social injustice, talking to people clad in black, or ending up beautifully hung in an art gallery. Yet it was clear to me that my artistic quest did not reside in an activism devoid of ritual, performance and aesthetics concerns. This disjunctive aspect, I thought, could be sorted out in a space where art, life, activism, protest, spirituality, healing, counseling, social work and celebration would come together without restriction, a locus that would propose dismantling fixed categories: artistic, political or otherwise.

With a general understanding of life in the Bronx, years of formal training in art and very little knowledge of politics, in 2005 I initiated a dialogue with Edwin Ramoran, the former director of Longwood Art Gallery/Bronx Council on the Arts, about my intention of being “baptized” in the water of the Bronx River. In 2008 I continued this conversation with Bill Aguado, the former executive director of the Bronx Council on the Arts. The ritual I planned would mark my passage from Lebanese Dominican, Dominican York (a Dominican who has settled permanently in New York City), and my transition into a Bronxite. The life-art ceremony I envisioned was to be preceded by a series of ongoing exchanges with individuals and groups in different neighborhoods in the borough, inviting those I met to reflect and actively question what it meant for them to be from the Bronx and to live there. Furthermore, I also hoped to unearth some of the perceptions and misperceptions that attempt to define the Bronx’s identity at home and abroad. The voices that would emerge during the conversations with the teenagers and seniors I met attested to the silence to which groups in power had relegated them for years. An example of this, offered by a student at Banana Kelly High School in the Longwood section, summarizes the mingling of anger, love, pain and political ferment. Art, for its part, laid out the space the student’s words inhabited: “When I think of The Bronx I think of it as where my home is. I grew up here. A lot of violence in the Bronx, happiness too. People have a lot of experiences. New faces everyday, millions of people, projects, styles of clothing and girls.”

To my surprise, the political sculpture that the students at Banana Kelly began to chisel out did not remain a dormant public art monument. Following a visit by Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr., some of the teens decided to write open letters to him, praising him for his accomplishments, demanding a more thoughtful gun-reduction program, asking Mr. Díaz to address some of the unanswered concerns they had about his invitation to Bronx residents to take back the streets. How can art use political strategies to underline the importance that these letters and the students’ voices pose? My response was to exhibit the letters publicly at Longwood Art Gallery and at other venues. It remains to be seen as to whether or not the art audiences who read these documents will remain complacent observers, gallery goers—art lovers happy to sip red wine and spend a few minutes looking at a cool political piece. In this case, one may be pushed to argue that Art (with capital a) has managed to commodify (Artify) politics.

In addition to the teenagers’ voices there were those of the seniors at La Casa de Felicidad, a brand-new building for older residents. A group of twelve of them worked with me for several weeks using art in everyday life to highlight their experiences aging in a South Bronx where buildings were no longer being burned by greedy landlords or by desperate tenants seeking to move out, yet where rents were making it difficult for long-term residents to stay put in the place that many of them saw collapse and which they are now seeing rise again. One of the seniors in the video that documents their actions commented: “People say The Bronx is a bad place, but The Bronx is good because this is the place where I have lived the life that I have.” Departing from the premise that the artwork I did with the group can in essence politicize and re-politicize society, as I write this piece, I am co-organizing with José Albino, Director of this senior citizens program, a screening of the video generated by the group. This event has the dual purpose of celebrating both the communal work created and also of moving the conversation of aging in The Bronx to the next level, to a stage of an artistic and political self-awareness where leadership can be fostered, irrespective of age. Is it about making art political or making political art? Or is it about using art as a malleable tool, just a tool, to understand and better one’s society?

As the presentation of Born Again: A Lebanese-Dominican Dominican York is Born Again as a Bronxite,1 drew near, I invited eight artists, through commissions from the Bronx Council on the Arts, to join in with independent projects of their own. And so, Nancy Hwang and wowe, Norene Leddy and Melissa Gira Grant, Michael Paul Britto, Ivan Monforte, Kathleena Howie-García (Lady K-Fever), and Linda Mary Montano, walked the streets of The Bronx, talking, hoping, dancing with and visiting some of its inhabitants. These artists and/or their collaborators turned politics into murals, generated videos documenting their struggles, mapped their route through different Bronx areas, and sat for family portraits—from Riverdale to the Grand Concourse. Nevertheless, aspects of the work produced, or at least most of its documentation, ended up in the white cube of the art gallery. Countering this, I would like to believe that in the exchanges between art and society those involved had the opportunity to rekindle the possibility of exercising citizenship. How can one as an artist remain silent?

Notes:
1 Born Again: A Lebanese-Dominican Dominican York is born again as a Bronxite was conceived by Nicolás Dumit Estévez for Longwood Art Gallery/ Bronx Council on the Arts and presented with collaborating organizations, including Bronx River Alliance, El Museo del Barrio, Banana Kelly High School, Lehman College Art Gallery, two programs from Phipps Community Development Corporation: Drew Gardens and La Casa de Felicidad, and THE POINT CDC, among others.

This piece was written in response to HOPE: A three-day performance by Linda Mary Montano in collaboration with Nicolás, and as part of Born Again, A Lebanese-Dominican Dominican York is Born Again as a Bronxite. Commissioned by The Bronx Council on the Arts. This essay was first published with Hemispheric Institute of Performance Arts and Politics at NYU.

Linda Mary Montano and Nicolás Dumit Estévez use e-mail as the channel through which they engage in a Q and A on Linda’s archive of four decades and the archive's recent journey from the Art/Life Institute in Kingston, NY, to the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University. During this discussion Montano, a seminal figure in performance art and the art of everyday life, talks about her art-life in relationship to consumerism, the environment, the spiritual, aging, death and creative renewal.

 THE ARCHIVE FLIES THE COOP, says Linda Mary Montano

 "More than anything I wish to thank everyone who mentored me, supported the archives over the years, encouraged me, helped me put things in boxes, hugged me and on the last day videotaped and performed to celebrate the archive flying the coop." Montano.

Nicolás: Linda, I had the opportunity to see the video documenting your recent celebration in Kingston, New York. Was this your official farewell to your archives as they got ready to journey from the Art/Life Institute to the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University?

Linda: Nicolás, yes, this was a send off of about 100 boxes to Fales, although I've kept back about 20 more boxes which will be sent there in the future and I am absolutely grateful to Marvin Taylor and Lisa Darms for inviting me into their art-safe-place. 

Because I've been thinking archive for sometime, I have mused on why archives are so in the zeitgeist right now! Is it because as living baby boomer artists we are facing some inevitabilities as we:

 1. Look around and see all of our tons of  "stuff" piling up around us.....

 2. Realize that paper, like dinosaurs, is "over" and that the future of saving is virtual and internet and invisible....

 3. Age and know for sure that our relatives might landfill our art when we die.....

 4. Watch too many hoarding reality shows and don't want to be identified as one and really know we are one.....

 5. Realize that the next and next and next generation of artists might like to see what we were thinking...

 6. Call our art our baby, our only child and insist on finding a final home for her/him/them.....

 7. Watch global weather patterns and wonder how much longer our "stuff" can survive undamaged in our studios.....

 8. Etc.

Linda: Recently, Franklin Furnace gave a call out for an archive project which addresses every single question or issue you might have about archives and I include the post now in it's entirety because I liked it so much and it might be of use to someone wanting to become part of this project. The post follows:

RADICAL ARCHIVES CONFERENCE

NYU, Friday, April 11-Saturday, April 12, 2014

Call for proposals for panels, papers, and performances

Deadline: Friday, January 10, 2014

Radical Archives is a two-day conference organized around the notion of archiving as a radical practice. An international contingent of archivists, artists, artist-archivists, activist archivists, theorists and scholars working within a range of archives and archival practices will be invited to present and discuss archives of radical politics andpractices; archives that are radical / experimental in form or function; how archiving in itself might be a radical act in certain moments or contexts; and how archives can be active in the present, as well as documents of the past or scripts for the future.

The conference will be organized around four major themes, include a number of presentation formats, and be supplemented by / documented through an online catalogue. We are calling for contributions relevant to thesethemes. Proposed formats could include panels, roundtables, individual papers or artist talks, performances or performance-lectures, screenings, interactive screen-based projects or live participatory projects.

Archive and Affect: Possible topics could include, but are not limited to: embodied/ performed archives; archive and repertory; buildings as archives; oral and informal histories; private versus public archives, and transitions between those states; warmversus cold data

Archiving Around Absence: Possible topics could include, but are not limited to: disappearing archives; deliberately destroyed archives; inadvertently preserved archives, or unofficial histories within official histories; reading for the shadows; strategiesof resistant or counter-archiving

Archives and Ethics: Possible topics could include, but are not limited to: stealing from archives; stealing as the foundation of archives;strategies of refusal or resistance to archiving; ownership of archived testimonies; intellectual property versusintellectual propriety; the afterlives of archives designed for specific purposes, e.g. archives of protests, activist movements, and human rights initiatives; the ethics of open access; FOIA and its discontents

Archive as Constellation: Possible topics could include, but are not limited to: archive as method; the artist's archive; the expanded archivalfield or notion of the archive; linking of archives across networks; film as archive; subversive or experimental uses ofmetadata, cataloguing and classification; archive and database, database and interface; how standards and interfacesshape our understanding of collections and the information they contain

To propose a paper or panel, please send an abstract (max 1 paragraph per paper) and brief speaker bios. Topropose a contribution in another format, please send a 1-page description of content & form and up to 3pages of relevant images/links.

Please send your proposal as a text, rich text, or PDF file to archive@kabul-reconstructions.net

Proposals due Friday, January 10, 2014

If you have any questions about proposal/contribution format or topic, send us an email. Index of the Disappeared(Mariam Ghani & Chitra Ganesh) archive@kabul-reconstructions.net

The conference is presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, where Ghani and Ganesh are the2013- 2014 Artists-in-Residence, and co-sponsored by the NYU Archives & Public History program.

Please contact Amita Manghnani at A/P/A if you are interested in co-sponsoring: amitam@nyu.edu

Nicolás:  I understand that your art practice of more than four decades must have generated a significant amount of materials, including photographs, letters, and props. How do you feel about parting with them and how does this endeavor relate to your concept of “Spring Cleaning” as an art and life pursuit? 

Linda: What an art colonic event that was, preparing every single item, paper-by-paper, document by document, letter by letter, because in cleaning out the amassed materials I found, yes, everything:

.  galleys of 5 books

.  my letters home when I was in a convent which might make an interesting book

 . 100 never published interviews with performance artist's from PERFORMANCE ARTISTS TALKING IN THE 80'S

 .  Chicken Wing drawings from my MFA show

 .  the VHS of my students' good-bye performance for me at UT Texas

.  Mitchell Payne's photos of all of my early performances

.  my father's incredible and Zenish paintings after he had a left brain stroke

.  then Texas Governor George Bush's letter of support for my performance art job at  UT Austin

.  letters of apology to my mother when I was  4

.  and lots of other things to laugh and cry over.

But honestly, because I never had a child I began feeling very precious about my past art adventures as I aged and developed some health issues.....and I wanted my materials and documents to be safe and happy and secure. The added benefit is that I now have a new openness, an actual and mental space, a feeling of been there done that and a chance to breathe in a new direction. It is a happy retirement feeling. The timing was organic and natural because years ago I would never have been able to part with the surrounding comfort of my creations and when it did happen and they drove off with those boxes, I wondered if this meant that death was right around the corner (which it always is), or if I was getting ready to live LIFE as ART.

Nicolás: Archives, together with social engagement and pedagogy have become a hot topic within the arts.  How does the subject of archives fit into your seminal practice?

Linda:: My practice has always been to listen to my voices. Sometimes they are not correct but in general they guide me to do what I need to do. For some 10 years I have been performing/thinking the word "archive" and putting out the desire to have my work saved from the wrecking ball. My video ARCHIVE FOR SALE, was made maybe 5 years ago as a reminder to the air that I was thinking archivally and whenever I put out a request to the "air", then I feel a collaboration with the possibility of things happening. In some circles this is called Prayer....Put the idea out, visualize it as  happening, don't doubt.

Nicolás: Was there a specific item in the banker’s boxes that was difficult to part with? Do you feel comfortable elaborating on this?

 Linda: So funny Nicolás, BANKERS BOXES!!! Don't you remember I was once a nun and grew up in war years and the depression mind? Those boxes are the correct way to do it...all lined up equally and strongly and perfectly. Like BANKERS!!! The boxes I used were hippie-looking, arte povera, wine boxes and raggedy packing boxes from grocery stores. And the joy of collecting 100 of these was an action of consequence in itself because every day I would go to the liquor stores on my way to Kingston, get 4 or more, and that became such an important dance step in this process of performing the handing over of my things to NYU.

Nicolás: I am curious as to the future performative lives your art archives may lead to at the Fales Library and Special Collections. Is the material culture that your art practice has generated open for reinterpretation? These days there is so much buzz about “re-performing.”

Linda: Who knows what will happen. Someone might do things with it. But I have no desires right now for any re-staging or repeating or reseeding of my work.  If it happens, fine. Performance is not a hidden Iron Mountain specialization anymore. Everyone performs and Youtubes their life.....If my performance language from  40 years ago would be of value, then I hope it will be used, but what is happening now is just as insightful and inspiring. Basically I like going down in the history as one of the elders and grandmothers of the 70's form. No big deal, just a grandmother talking a strange language.

Nicolás: Only you, LMM, would think of biblical food in the context of a goodbye archives party. Can you talk about any possible connection between the two? I can’t stop thinking about the biblical manna. After all, this item can be linked to the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt, and it certainly speaks of pilgrimages, and journeys through the wilderness.

Linda: For the archive party, I indicated on the invitation, that there would be "biblical" food, popcorn (Manna) and wine (Communion). Also there would be a prize for the best popcorn so that the opening would feel participatory. Women who want to be Catholic WOMENPRIESTS, as I always did,  (there are now about 150) will do anything to link their art to the priest-priestess vehicle. 

Nicolás, because you went to Union Theological Seminary and studied all of that theology, you are reading even more beauty-theology into my intentions which I totally like. Popcorn had always been a symbolic food that I used in past performances because of its association with my father and his showing love for us by making popcorn. The love is in each kernel, till this day and isn't that what Communion is all about?

Nicolás:: How does it feel to let go? Any advice for those of us artists and art and life practitioners still weighed down by file cabinets of slides, photographs, half-chewed loafs of bread and bits of scabs from past pilgrimages?

Linda: Oh BABY! I wish luck to all archive-wanters. It is such a double-edged sword......making, storing, keeping, recording, saving, sharing, recycling. If only it was as easy as a SHARE BUTTON...........which is actually the next life of all of these papers/documents and things. Yipee, a fast-track to eternal salvation. There eventually will be a robot who can sort it all, archive it all. Wait a few years.

Nicolás: I visited you once at the Art/Life Institute. Now that your archives are at New York University, how do you see the role of this space in terms of your art practice?

Linda: Selling it, although I totally love this space. Paring down.

Nicolás: Any tips for archiving art and life and the performative aside from video, film and photography? 

Linda: The Web.  And pay the fee now, pay $$$$ ahead of time and reserve our website for the next 40 years and then we are guaranteed that it will always be there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Or is this just a deep, unconscious yearning for posterity and heaven, not hell.

Having an archive is really a way to dislodge a deep and abiding FEAR OF DEATH AND DYING. All this legacy talk about sharing my work with others is total bull. I'm really afraid of being totally nothing.

Nicolás: You are one of those artists who have the capacity to keep reinventing themselves. What are the implications of this in your existing archives or in an incipient one?

Linda: Now when someone wants to give me a paper or book, I run away screaming. 

Linda Mary Montano (born January 18, 1942, Saugerties, NY) 

This piece was first published online with Transart Institute’s Else Journal

Update: in 2021 the final five boxes of slides, photos and writings were shipped to NYU Fales Library

LINDA: NICOLÁS, YOU ARE STANDING ON A VERY INTERESTING GROUND RIGHT NOW...THE GROUND OF ART AND THE GROUND OF LIFE BECAUSE YOU HAVE TIES TO WHAT IS PROBABLY THE LARGEST DISASTER EVER: THE EARTHQUAKE IN HAITI ...BECAUSE YOU ARE DOMINICAN, YOU ARE LIKE THE COUSIN WHO KNOWS MORE THAN EVERYONE ELSE ...YOU ARE FROM THAT ISLAND AND KNOW THE HISTORY, CULTURE AND STORIES. SO WE NEED YOUR INFORMATION AND INSIGHTS RIGHT NOW! PLEASE TEACH US.

Nicolás: Linda, I am still processing a disaster that made itself present to me in bits and pieces through the media, the telephone conversations that I have been having with my mother, Maragarita María, in the Dominican Republic, and email exchanges with Haitian friends in the U.S. and abroad. Unlike my stepfather in Santiago, who when the tremors hit, called his wife thinking that he was having a seizure, I have been shaken intermittently by the graphic images coming through computer and TV screens. I don’t have a BlackBerry.

Before I continue answering your question, I would like to mention that recently I had a long telephone conversation with Sandy Plácido, a young Dominican scholar from The Bronx. Haiti, of course, was at the very center of our dialogue. We asked each other whether this was the right moment to talk about it or to concentrate all our energies in helping this country. My replied to Sandy was “Why not do both things?” Why not use the momentum this nation is experiencing to ask questions we never dared to voice. Before hanging up, I brought up to her your idea to take on some of Haiti’s pain(s) through your DYSTONIA treatment. Can you expand on this? How does the transference of pain works for you and those on the other side? What are your thoughts behind this art-life action in the context of such a devastating catastrophe? Can I ask you one question I often get? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?

I am going to take up the cousin comment in your opening statement. Cousins are for me very close family members since for fifteen years I was an only child. Haiti was the cousin we never visited or the one whom, at any attempt to visit us, we would flee from. Nevertheless, this family member would stop by our places by way of defamatory stories circulating word of mouth in primary school about a black man from the other side of the island stealing Dominican children. Haiti was the boogie-man, el Cuco. Haiti was the cousin with whom I would have LOVED to played hide and seek in the dark Caribbean night. The cousin I was longing to meet. Haiti is the cousin that for two years has kept me an insomniac in the South Bronx. From 2008-2009 I received grants from Art Matters, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC) and Printed Matter to engage in Borderless, an art-life experience for which I have been traveling from my home in New York to Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, my birthplace in the Dominican Republic, to trace any connection that my relatives and I might have with the neighboring Republic. Did I tell you that part of my mother’s side of the family came from Lebanon by ship? Some Lebanese families not related to us settled next door, in Haiti. Anyhow, I cannot yet discard the possibility of connecting with Haiti through a Middle Eastern relative.

To summarize what could turn into an extensive narration, in 2009, in the town of Guayubín, near the Haitian border, Uncle Julio gave me confirmation of the Haitian background of my great-grandmother Inocencia Ortíz Belliard (Belliard was her French last name). Triggered by this revelation, I asked Uncle Julio and my cousin Venecia to take me to the local cemetery to find her grave. “She was black,” he said, un-self-consciously approaching the l stereotypical topic of race and ethnicity dominating almost all conversations about the relationship between the two countries. The same dialogue unveiled a link with Venezuela on behalf of my father’s side of the family. But let’s go back to Haiti. Inocencia’s grave is unmarked, and is next to that of her husband Manuel Espejo (Papá Muele). His is also unmarked, so we do not know for sure which is Inocencia’s. The two of them are resting side by side on what felt to my feet like a big sandbox dotted with conch shells in various states of disintegration. Why has it taken me forty-two years plus what seems like an endless journey through the cosmos to get to this particular moment? I don’t know if my late father Nicolás would have approved of this. His resting place is not too far from the locus of action. Papi shares a wide, white washed grave with his twin brother Eufemio. They are a few feet from Inocencia and Papá Muele.

Linda: WHAT DOES IT SIGNIFY, BEING DOMINICAN?

Nicolás: Rather than putting words in someone else’s mouth I am going to leave this question open for people to answer. What does it mean for you, reader to be Dominican? Please send your responses to this email

Is it dancing merengue, clinging to the tricolor flag, or eating an elastic mangú (man-goo) boiled and mashed green plantains that makes one Dominican? Have you have this dish? I could make it for you or we can have it at a restaurant in Longwood. We should have gone over this question while enjoying mangú with sautéed onions on top, melted cheese, and a glass of morir soñando, die dreaming, (orange juice mixed with milk). We can call it art-life. Any ideas for this? By the way, I don’t know how to play baseball. Does that make me less Dominican? I found this interesting video on youtube posted by a what seems like a young Dominican man living in New York City. It is worthwhile watching. Click HERE

In my case, Dominicanidad has meant undertaking an ongoing search of all of the elements that inform who I might be. I am Dominican because I am a: New Yorker, Bronxite, Lebanese-Dominican, Dominican-York, Lebanese, Catalan, Venezuelan, Haitian, African, New Berliner, Nuyorican, Spaniard, and who knows what else. I came to the realization that I am engaged in an undertaking that can bring my identity to some kind of dissolution or collapse. This process I am pointing to has brought me at times to an uncertain territory. I am up for this. Better there that than spending life in a prefab Lalaland.

Linda: BRIEFLY, WHAT IS THE CULTURAL HISTORY, THE POLITICAL HISTORY AND SPIRITUAL HISTORY OF BOTH THE DR AND HAITI...HOW DO THEY COMPARE AND CONTRAST?

Nicolás: What we know today as Haiti and the Dominican Republic was colonized upon Columbus’s arrival in 1492. The whole island was named Hispaniola, becoming part of the geographic portfolio of the Spanish crown. In less than a century after the conquest its indigenous inhabitants were decimated, and after years of colonial neglect, Buccaneers, a group of freebooters from different European places, settled on the island of Tortuga on the northwest coast. In 1667 France took possession of the west portion of Hispaniola. What follows is a long series of dispute between France and Spain for leadership over the colony and later on, Dominican and Haitian struggles to define the border demarcating both nations. The biggest national holiday in the Dominican Republic is the independence of the country not from Spain, but from Haiti in 1844. What is today the Dominican Republic was from 1822-44 Haitian territory.

It is worthwhile moving back in time. In the XVIII, as a result of dissimilar economies, African slaves and their descendants on each side of the island were engaged in a different kind relationship with their European masters. While French Saint Domingue’s expansion made Haiti the jewel of France in the Americas, the Spanish counterpart barely got by in an economy of subsistence. This resulted in a higher number of Africans arriving in Saint Domingue, and not only that, in a stricter demand for production. All of this will come to inform the overall identity of the Haitian and the Dominican Republics in regards to Africa and the colonizers. The stereotypical perception is of Haitians as poor and African and of Dominicans as lighter skinned Latin. The Spaniard Grandparent Syndrome (SGS), as I call it, is so prevalent in the Dominican Republic, where many claim to have a Spaniard ancestor. In any case, the first time I traveled to Spain I was taken aback by feeling at home. Was I not properly weaned from the motherland?

Pat Roberson talks about the pact Haitians made with the devil in order to obtain their independence from France and to form the first black republic in the Americas? The tele evangelist is not as historically uninformed as he seems to be at first, but ingeniously deceiving in masking the why of the many misfortunes of Haiti. The major one is the heavy reparations that France imposed on the newly created country (the equivalent today of 21 billion dollars) to recognize their independence and the U.S. later involvement in the country’s politics. What Pat is describing is the affront of a bunch of colored peoples to fight for their freedom. Historically, Pat is talking about the Bois Caïman ceremony on August 14th, 1791 were slaves gestated the revolution that would free them from the colonizer. The conflation of African beliefs was a unifying force in this event. Anyhow, Pat is not alone in his description of a nation who faithfully follows the wrong path, a crowd of glassy-eyed zombies walking after dark. The media has done a magnificent job painting Haiti as the poorest place in the whole hemisphere. Have we been told why? This link is to a video giving some answers to this question. It was sent to me by a Haitian colleague living in Berlin. Click HERE

One recurrent comment that I have been hearing in the midst of the catastrophe is that implying that something good might come out of this: What does a 7.0 earthquake mean in a place that before the earthquake hit was already a disaster? Wasn’t Haiti in a state of emergency prior to that?

A day or two after the earthquake, a reporter on TV got confused and said Haw… (meaning Hawaii), while trying to refer to Haiti. He quickly realized his mistake. It seemed like he swapped the names of heaven and hell during mass. 

Can we I leave the discussion on spirituality for later? I know that you are about to ask me about one particular aspect of it.

Linda: WE ARE ALL VERY INTERESTED IN THE CONCEPT OF VOODOO AND HOW DO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT VOODOO AND HOW IT IS PRACTICED IN BOTH THE DR AND HAITI?

Nicolás: Voodoo, Vodou, we call it Vudú in Spanish, has had a good share of treatments in the U.S., from Hollywood movies to anthropological literature. From The Serpent and the Rainbow to Tell my Horse. To give you an example, in the section on Haiti in I Tell my Horse, Zora Neale Hurston narrates how she came face to face with a living dead, a Zombie, and goes on to describe some of the bloody secret societies that flourished in Haiti at the time of her research in the late ‘30s. In the Dominican oral history of zombification, people are taken from the East to the West side of the island to be turned into one of these creatures. There are those who affirm having seeing someone who disappeared in the Dominican Republic walk the streets of a Haitian town.

Growing up it was commonplace for many of my family members and neighbors in the Dominican Republic to practice ritualistic actions for the purpose of changing the course of an everyday situation: an upside down broom with several crystal of sea salt, propped on a corner helped an overwhelmed host get rid of an undesirable guest. I tried this on many occasions. Women stuffed in their shoes a piece of paper bearing the name of the man they wished to keep subjugated and under the soles of their feet. The names of undesirable people were frozen at the subzero temperatures of the electric refrigerator. To me this was a mild form of zombification. We used camphor to shoo away evil and were instructed to pick up suspicious packages with our left hand. I remember helping my grandmother tie Saint Peter’s testicles, symbolized by a stone, which we hung to stop a torrential rain.

Chromolithographies of saints were put upside down until the saint fulfilled one’s request. Saint Anthony has spent a lifetime with his head on the Dominican soil. Wannabe brides do so to urge him to find them a suitable candidate for marriage. Some of the ritualistic actions that I described above could possibly trace their origins to our African heritages, others are the product of the religious syncretism that prevails in an area where Africans forcefully brought to the region worshiped some of their deities through the representation of Catholic imagery. For example, Changó, the god of thunder is represented by the image of St. Barbara and Belié Belcán’s Catholic equivalent is as Saint Michael Archangel.

Linda: WHAT DOES VOODOO MEAN TO YOU PERSONALLY NOW? BACK WHEN YOU LIVED THERE?

Nicolás: Linda, How does one deal with Catholic guilt? How does one reconcile with believes other than those instilled through centuries by the Church? Is it fair to answer a question with another question? Please give us a recipe for shedding off our Judeo-Christian guilt. We are the children of the children of the children of the children of the children of the children of the children who were brought here from Africa. We managed to hold onto a piece of the umbilical cord. Mine was sandwiched in a photo album. I was born with forceps, went to church every once in a while. The Catholicism we practiced at home was a lapsed one. I will try to keep our conversation on Vodou as simple as possible. We are treading into a complex territory. The reference to horses has to do with the fact that when the Vodou practitioner is possessed by one of the misterios or luas (spirits) they are said to be mounted by them. The lua or misterio rides the person hosting them. So much to tell. My mother would take me to the houses of people who had the most amazing altars. We would go there for consultation and to get help fixing certain aspects of our lives. There were those who would go to them to get trabajos, works for getting married or for enhancing their luck. Our visits were mostly for spiritual purposes. I was told over and over that I had a light and that I was eventually supposed to get baptized in order to serve the spirits. By the age of seven or so I had amassed a personal altar of a remarkable size. I would use all of the money that Lebanese relatives would give when I would go to visit them at their textile stores downtown to buy chromolithographies of Catholic Saints. The 4” x 6” were no more than a quarter. One of my favorite ones was St. Clare holding a monstrance in her hands. Clare, Clara (clear) in Spanish. Her role was to clear up our path from obstacles.

Now. I keep in touch with one Vodou practitioner. We became good friends when I was attending a master degree at Tyler School of Art. He helped me with my thesis on the aesthetics of the Dominican Vodou altar. This man and his friends taught me a great deal about sharing and caring for one another. Together we would travel to the most economically disadvantaged areas of Santiago and would be received by those who had so little with such amount of generosity. Now I do not practice Vodou but recognize that I have been deeply shaped by it. I often think of the light that I carry inside of me. I ponder about the implications of awakening it.

The Spanish speaking Caribbean has a very strong relationship with the flesh, with the here and the now. I have call it a culture of the flesh. Vodou is a religion in which the deities can travel to our physical world and manifest themselves tangibly. For example, I was able to interact with El Barón del Cementerio, St. Elijah or the Lord of the Cemetery, during a celebration. The woman possessed by him wore a purple and black gown. She resembled a dead person. Here we are talking about gender bending. Linda, I warned you before of the complexity of the subject. I am just scratching the surface.

Linda: HOW DOES IT INTESECT YOUR ART/LIFE? ARE YOU COMFORTABLE WITH IT? IT IS MYSTERIOUS AND VERY COMPELLING TO OUTSIDERS AND SO WE ARE ALL CURIOUS. AND FRIGHTENED BECAUSE IT IS SEEN AS TABOO. THE TABOO MAKES US INTERESTED AND ALSO FRIGHTENS US...

Not too long ago I realized that almost everything I create references altar-building in the Vodou tradition. When I moved to the South Bronx, five years ago, I vowed to myself to keep my office free of art, objects, or any kind of decoration. You should come and see the place: braids in glass jars, a calendar of the Sacred Heart of Mary and two of Fefita La Grande (a folk singer in the Dominican Republic who is in reality a performance artist who happens to play the accordion), a huge French Canadian print of a nurse tending to sick man, who is in reality Jesus, a holy Rosary in a plastic bag, a purse of yours that I got at one of your performances, soil from the Dominican Republic and Haiti side by side in jars, like the two portions of the island, like the graves of my father and his twin brother, like the unmarked tombs of my great grandparents near the border, like the Vodou Marasas: St. Cosme and St. Damian.

There is fear in what we don’t know. I fear to drive on an US highway. I fear the prospect of wearing a suit and tie and working on Wall Street. I used to fear leaving New York City for more than a day. There is fear in treading into the unfamiliar and getting swallowed by it. I used to fear becoming an “American” until I realized that I was one before I moved to the U.S. from the Americas. Why do you think that outsiders including yourself are scared by Vodou? Can you suggest a performance for dealing with fear?

Linda: HOW WILL THE EVENTS IN HAITI AFFECT YOUR ART AND LIFE? WILL IT CHANGE THEM FOREVER?

Nicolás: Any security we have put in place to make our lives safer can slip away in a matter of seconds. We should not wait for a tragedy to come in contact with those we care for. I open my eyes and everything is standing. I close my eyes. I open them again and I find myself in the midst of the rubble. Earthquakes are constantly trying to wake us up. Some of these tremors can only be experienced at an individual level, but nevertheless hit all of those around us. Paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, videos, installations, audio pieces, site-specific works, get lost during periods of wars, massacres, nuclear destruction, genocides, ethnic cleansing. Yet art remains forever as reminder of its power to pull us out of the muck. I mean art as: helping others in distress, transporting a sick person to an emergency room, emptying our pockets and sending money to those in need.

Days after the earthquake my cousin emailed me from Hong Kong to ask me how will this situation change Borderless. I think she really meant to ask me how is this going to affect my search. I am sure that many of our Haitian cousins lost their lives to the tragedy. I am sure that many more remain to be helped and rescued from the debris, and that many, many, more than those dead have survived and will be there for our first encounter.

On January 25th I received an email from Notreda Belliard sent from the border town of Ounaminthe, telling me in broken Spanish that she was OK: Estoy contento de tomar tu noticia. Espero que todo va bien para tí. Para nosotros no hay nunguna persona que se muerte durante este terremodo. Y tú como estas?” I am happy to hear from you. I hope that all is well. There are no dead among us. And how are you?

Notreda and I met during my visit to Haiti in 2009. She promised to introduce me in future visits to other members of the Belliard family.

Dear Reader I am looking to get in touch with the Belliard family in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. My e-mail addresses is: click HERE

Linda: ASK YOURSELF ANY QUESTIONS I MISSED.

Nicolás: Thank you, Linda.
What can I do to help Haiti’s current situation?

Donate Now. Please don’t wait.
Pray.
Get involved.
Adopt a child who might need a home.
Research the history of the place.
Update our own image of this country.
Give a presentation on the colonization of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Question the leaders of the powerful nations and their involvement in other countries.
If living in the so-called First World: Avoid repeating historical mistakes.
If in the Dominican Republic or in Haiti: Strive to live in harmony.
Write about Haiti in your church, office, school or college newsletter.
Become a Haitian.

MONTANO'S COMMENTS: NICOLÁS AFTER READING AND THINKING ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE THINKING ABOUT, I AM THINKING THESE CONSIDERATIONS:

1. DO YOU THINK THAT YOU HAVE A LIFE'S WORK/ART SORTING OUT YOUR AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

2. DO YOU FEEL THAT YOUR LIFE AS A PERFORMANCE ARTIST CAN BE "USED" TO MAKE A NEW UNDERSTANDING, A NEW PEACE, A NEW OPENING OF TOLERANCE BETWEEN THE D.R. AND H.?

3. WE TALKED ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE OF MY BEING OTHERS (BOB DYLAN, MOTHER TERESA, PAUL MCMAHON AND FICTIONAL OTHERS INCLUDING THE ALCOHOLIC, FRENCH WOMAN, COUNTRY WESTERN SINGER). DO YOU FEEL THAT IN D.R. - H WITH THE PERFORMANCE PRACTICE THAT YOU ARE DOING IS TIME FOR YOU TO BE EVEN MORE PERFORMATIVELY "HAITIAN" THAN YOU ARE ...THAT IS THE BRAIDS ARE "HAITIAN" CORRECT? I AM NOT PROPOSING YOU DO "BLACK-FACE" BUT I WOULD DEFINITELY TALK TO ADRIAN PIPER NOW ABOUT YOUR CURRENT PRACTICE...

4.HOW DO YOU TEACH TOLERANCE AND RESPECT TO THE CHILDREN OF EACH CULTURE, D.R.-H.? CHILDRENS BOOKS? WORKSHOPS? LECTURES?

WHY? IF I WAS BROUGHT UP IN THE D.R. AND WAS FED THE THOUGHTS YOU WERE FED ABOUT H. , I WOULD THINK THAT IT IS TIME FOR A RE-THINKING OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TWO CULTURES. AS A PERFORMANCE ARTIST AND A D.R , YOU ARE IN A VERY WONDERFUL POSITION OF BEING ABLE TO INTERVENE HERE, HELP TRANSFORM SOME OLD WOUNDS.

I SEND THESE AS COMMENTS , NOT AS QUESTIONS TO BE ANSWERED. AGAIN, N, THANKS FOR TEACHING ME AND GIVING ME HOPE THAT ART CAN MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE IN OUR OWN LIVES AND IN THE LIVES OF OTHERS. IN ART/LIFE/LAUGHTER, LINDA MARY MONTANO

Nicolás: Dear Linda, I just saw your comments at the end of the interview. I kept looking for them within the main text. I would like to think about your words for several days, since there are very relevant to the path that I am seeking to take with art-life. I don't know if I mentioned to you that before I emailed you for the first time in 2006, from Saratoga Springs, I kept hearing a voice telling me: "get in touch with her, get in touch with her". I am glad that I did. God bless you. I am including some images of my trip to the cemetery in the Dominican Republic Taken by Sol Aramendi. Unlike in the U.S., some of the cemeteries there are quite active with people bringing food to the Lord of the Cemetery, people performing Vodou, people praying, talking to the dead or enacting rituals. Most cemeteries are gated and close around 6 PM. Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Ortíz Morel Belliard

Linda’s letter to Nicolás and Alysha

DEAR NICOLÁS AND ALYSHA,

I AM ANSWERING THE REQUEST FOR INFORMATION ABOUT MARY AND TRAVEL AND IMAGES AND PILGRIIMAGES AND CATHOLICISM AND THE VERY INTENSE AND ALMOST NEW INTEREST IN HER POWER THESE DAYS.

I GREW UP VERY STRICT AND ORTHODOX ROMAN CATHOLIC AND ALWAYS HAD A DEVOTION TO MARY AND THANK GOD THAT IT WAS ENCOURAGED BY THE CATHOLIC SCHOOL I ATTENDED.

MY MIDDLE NAME IS MARY AND AT CONFIRMATION I WAS ABLE TO CHOOSE ANOTHER NAME AND I CHOSE BERNADETTE BUT MY DAD SAID, YOU HAVE THE NAME MARY AND THAT WILL BE YOUR CONFIRMATION NAME..HE SAID,"MARY IS ENOUGH."    I NOW SEE THE WISDOM OF HIS WORDS.

SO THAT IS MY JOURNEY, TO REALIZE THAT SHE IS ENOUGH AND IT HAS TAKEN ME SOME 50 YEARS TO REALLY GET THAT. 

SO HERE I AM NOW, A RETURNED ROMAN CATHOLIC WITH A VERY INTENSE DESIRE TO KNOW HER, HAVING DONE MY B.A. ART SCULPTURE SHOW TITLED:

THE MYSTERY OF THE VISITATION, MARY AND ELIZABETH BOTH EMBRACING, BOTH PREGNANT

LITTLE DID I KNOW
THAT MARY WOULD LEAD ME TO PILGRIMAGES TO HER "SITES" OVER THE PAST 4 YEARS 

THAT SHE WOULD LITERALLY "APPEAR" TO ME AS A GUIDE AND AS "ME"

THAT SHE WOULD TALK TO ME AND TELL ME AS I SAT IN A CHURCH IN FRONT OF HER STATUE IN MEDJUGORJE THAT, "I WILL BE YOUR MOTHER WHEN MRS MEHTA (MY SECOND MOTHER) DIES"

AND THAT I WOULD GO TO ONE AUCTION IN MY LIFE AND THERE AT THE AUCTION, I WOULD SEE A CARVED STATUE OF HER THAT WAS MAGNIFICENT AND... LONG STORY.... BUT WENT TO THE MAN WHO BID FOR HER (I DIDN’T HAVE THE SKILL TO DO IT ALTHOUGH WAITED 3 HOURS SO I COULD) AND THAT NEXT DAY HER "PRICE" WENT FORM 400$ TO 1250$ AND I TRADED MY MOTHER'S TEACHER'S PAINTINGS FOR HER AND SHE WAS CARRIED THROUGH THE STREETS OF SAUGERTIES NY TO MY PARENTS' HOME WHERE I NOW LIVE AND SHE LIVES IN THE "CHAPEL" I HAVE MADE...

HER GLASS EYES AVOID ME WHEN I HAVE DISPLEASED MY "VOWS "OR FAILED TO KEEP THE 10 COMMANDMNETS

WHAT A MOTHER, WHAT A TEACHER , WHAT A FRIEND MARY IS.

MAY SHE BE HONORED AND RESPECTED BY ALL,

LINDA MARY MONTANO 

Nicolás’s letter to Linda

Nicolas Dumit EstevezDecember 19, 2009 at 5:30 PM

dear linda:

in one of our e-mail exchanges i remember sharing with you the story of the Holy Virgin sleepovers with me during my childhood. She came to my home from higüey, a pilgrimage site east of santiago de los treinta caballeros, where my grandmother fefi had been to pay a visit to La Altagracia, the patroness of the dominican republic. the icon that fefi brought me as a souvenir was a small metal pendant that i housed in an empty powder box. the container was the same as the ones that my mother used to buy for me year after year to give to female teachers as presents at the end of the school term. i can clearly recall the color of the plastic box: white, and the gold lettering embossed on the top, boasting the brand of the product with certain degree of elegance. not much. being slightly raised, had i thought about it at the time, the seal would have made a good texture to rub during my recurrent insomniac nights. these days i can easily make the association between this particular feature and the coarse beads of my wooden rosary. i took Mary to bed late at night. since then, even as a young child, i followed the schedule of the adults in the house. it could have been past midnight when the Virgin, tucked under my sheets, put me to sleep. sadly enough, i don’t remember what ever happen to the Virgin and her homemade home — but i do know that the home that housed Her was eventually put up for sale by my family. 

growing up catholic entailed one to be open to apparitions, anytime, anywhere, and i was no exception. between the ages of five and seven i was to be the host to more than one unexpected guest, the Holy Virgin amongst them. She was revealed to me in the sky at the end of an after school playdate with my neighbors. none of the children who were with me saw Her way up high, framed in one of the three very large ovals that were carved out of the clouds for the sole purpose of highlighting Her presence, along with that of two women who smiled in perpetuity. Mary had a message for me that i was not able hear. i could see her from afar earnestly trying to communicate. what the Virgin wanted to tell me, i never knew. i ran home, to the same house where I had made the powder box abode for the Holy Visitor, to give my mother the missive. mami professed to believe in my encounter, but gradually stopped believing in the subject of my vision.

before relocating to peterborough, nh in 2007, i never heard of the traveling Virgin of Fatima program. i read a memo about it as i entered Saint Peter’s church at the top of the town. my immediate response was to put my name on the sign up sheet where potential hosts could ask to bring Our Lady to their homes for one full week. more than thirty-three years have elapsed since my encounter with the Virgin and i welcomed meeting again She who appeared to me as a child in the frothy white clouds. one of my current reservations is how to deal with the obvious physicality of the St. Peter’s church Virgin in the midst of my purely spiritual devotion. the Our Lady of Fatima that i am describing is fashioned out of man-made resin, and travels from house to house with an array of earthly positions consisting of an electric votive light, a plastic angel holding a replica of the Holy Eucharist, a big shawl to cover the surface where the Virgin would come to rest, a small doily to go over the big shawl and a cardboard box with videos, novenas, a journal and a tangled mass of free rosaries (pink and baby blue); all of which fit neatly in a green canvas suitcase with wheels. the week She visited me went by somewhat fast. guilt invaded my thoughts—not enough time praying, didn’t bring my host any flowers, left one of the novenas unfinished. the presence of the Visitor only became tangible to me after i brought Her back to the church, and I returned home faced with an urgent call to fill the empty space left by the icon.

Nicolás Dumit Estévez, December 19, 2009, The Bronx, NY

Nicolás: Dear Linda, I greatly welcome the opportunity to talk with you. I find that our conversations, at least from my perspective as an artist from a younger generation, serve a very valuable pedagogical role. Learning with you is always surprising, never stale or prescribed. It is fun and scary. I will always remember the day you suggested I make an appointment to present my art project to a priest. Only you! I never know what your “assignments” might be.

Nicolás: Can you talk about your history of collaborations with other artists? 

Linda: I cannot mention the names of other "artists" Nicolás, because that is the beginning of a big sin....mention one and not the others!!!! So I will begin with my first "lifeist" collaboration and that was with my grandmother, Lena. She was formidable, large, totally zen, beyond talented, an outsider "artist" and my first teacher. As a small child, I would come home from school in now-chic upstate NY, Saugerties, and walk 3 minutes, unaccompanied, to my grandmother's home and watch her for at least 3 hours a day. I was being trained in seeing then doing and not talking, not asking questions and not having to ever critique or judge her or me or the creative process. We collaborated in a very Asian way....the way of watching, not doing. Throughout my life I have had very similar relationships with teachers who gave birth to my creativity via their letting me be in their beauty-presence. I imagine that collaboration is a similar infusion of energized ecstasy. This would be a good time to tell the following image-thief story. In 1997, I collaborated with a country, India. I was given a summer research grant while teaching at UT Texas and went to India to research death and nursing homes in Benares. What I learned about collaborating was more revealing than what I learned about death because I came face to face with my inner cultural consuming gene. The kind Benares man who opened my eyes to my pirating their country by coming there, doing my video then going home and using it to try to get tenure, was a true teacher! A Brahmin, he in both words, attitude and glance, let me know that coming to India to export "her" via my art, was not a good way to collaborate with his MOTHER INDIA! I was totally taught the sin of insensitive snap-snap then leave-leave. This collaboration with his India, gone amuck, changed my whole life and altered the way I practice, in fact, I started collaborating with my own physical home and myself much more intentionally!

Nicolás: Given your involvement with art in everyday life, and the openness with which you have framed (unframed?) your art practice and your day-to-day, how would you define the concept of collaboration? 

Linda: I imagine that it is like falling in love, or needing something that someone can do or needing to use what someone has. It is like feeling a mutuality of mirrored intention and vibed similarity of purpose or style. It is like being high or turned on and amazed that the 2 or 6 of you can make such beauty together. But therein lies the ephemerality of it. This is the utopian view but if you stay in a collaboration for more than one project, then you get into real time reality show stuff with feelings and rubbings of your art-skin against theirs. You get into whose name is first and where are we going to eat and who is paying for the meal tonight and how do you split the honorarium! Some people do this with great grace, some are not interested in grace, just struggle. Maybe the current cosmic "rapture' and Armageddon and fall of the empires will force a proximity and sharing and community mindedness that is less about us artist being singular individuals. Maybe collaboration will be the only way? Maybe we will hit the delete button of who is more famous and get so inspired by an OCCUPY WALL STREET kind of mentality, that we will make efforts to share the limelight.

Nicolás: Can you think of a collaboration that, while artistic in nature, has taken place for you in your day-to-day? I am asking this thinking of the vast number of unstated collaborations in which we, human beings, engage in an ongoing basis; collaborations with our mothers and fathers, with our teachers, and with society in general? 

Linda: Currently, I am very interested in the ephemera of my dream life. It is good TV. 

Nicolás: What would you say are the most important points for artists to keep in mind at the moment of initiating a dialogue about a potential collaboration?

Linda: TAKE PRE-MARRIAGE COUNSELING!!!!!!!! Why? Because everything that couples will deal with in a traditional marriage, comes up in exactly the same way when 2 or more artists do a project. Brutal honesty should proceed the commitment of getting involved with each other. We usually fall into a project without any guidelines or rules but actually there is no need to feel shy or to be embarrassed by the monster hall of fame issues like: Whose name is first? How much money do we ask for? It was my idea and you are gobbling this up and have made it yours! Why did you get credit and I didn’t? Why are you making work exactly like mine? Why are you so jealous of me? Why do they always use a picture with you out front and me in the back? Why do I always have to do the PR? I'm tired of making lunch! I'm tired of paying for lunch! Why do we always use my car? Why does the press ask you questions and not me? Why do you sing so loud and drown me out? The concerns are endless. These all sound ridiculous and funny but I really believe that people who work together should feel a permission to look at all of the life-stuff that bugs us because......just because we are these fabulous, genius, talented, star-artists doesn’t mean that we aren’t human babies with the emotional responses of a 6 year old in diapers! And when you get more than two 45 year old artists with 6 year old emotional/intellectual responses, the scene can be migraine-making and quite smelly.

Nicolás: Big Egos can easily interfere with the learning that could emerge through collaborations. Do you have a simple recipe for counteracting this situation?

Linda: TAKE A PRE-MARRIAGE COUNSELING CLASS before the collaboration and write down concerns and talk about them before you start wildly texting and Skyping your great thoughts, ideas and dreams. Do it before dual arrogance sets in.

Nicolás: I don’t know if you have noticed a growing trend in the arts to engage in healing. However, I must say that as much as art can nourish one and heal one’s wounds, there is a side of Art that can be quite damaging. This is the face of Art that often surfaces when collaborations go wrong. Many of us have experienced this. What is your advice for recovering from a collaboration that has left one with a black eye, or a missing tooth?

Linda: Silence. Don’t talk until you are ready to do the POST-MARRIAGE COUNSELING.

NDE: What is your dream collaboration? When answering this question, imagine there are no limits?

Linda: A one night stand always works for me because then I don’t have to do the counseling. I can leave looking like a nice person and actually seem that way! More time together, more reality. 

Nicolás: With whom and under what circumstances would you dream of collaborating?

Linda: A large techie institution where the techie people are paid tons of money to assist artists to do work and a place that will pay the artists and collaborators good money as well. There is a level of BUSINESS and professionalism that can happen when things are cut and dried by this kind of institutionalism. Professional kindness. This makes everyone nice. But maybe collaboration is over and a moot point? The internet has eliminated the need for face and accountability and presence and gratitude because we can log on and get what we need and delete what we don’t need and nothing needs to be traced to its source. And spending an hour on FB everyday is like a faux collaboration, allowing me to at least visually imagine that I am co-making that sculpture, co-designing that building, co-singing that song, co-creating that painting with the artist I am skimming by and then immediately deleting!!

Nicolás: Does it sound right to you to move into the subject of mentoring?

Linda: Sure. If we were to trace our lives back, there is always a person, place or thing that gave us our wings. Asians know about this kind of lineage thinking and they learn how to thank the past , the present and how to give credit. We don’t know how to do that and we are not culturally grateful. I think it is an American cultural sin: we came here and pushed our way west without regard for anything but our push! We are consumers of beauty, consumers of ideas and consumers of others. But there is hope because the good manners of our global village co-inhabitors are beginning to be learned by our cowboy, lone ranger shoot em up selves. Plus I feel that lineage-gratitude and footnoting and giving credit needs to be taught in art schools. But ideas are tricky things...They cant be held onto or claimed because often 329842390 people have the same idea and all want to make $87,878 on it. This is the sickness of art and self. In cultures where community/anonymity is the highest commodity and where sharing an experience is more important than being the main honcho, we get to see the model of art as a vehicle for the sacred.

Nicolás: At first sight, one could argue that there are marked differences between the concepts of collaboration and mentoring. There are also many similarities. What is your understanding of the two?

Linda: We all want to be the boss. People who have not had children are totally dangerous when it comes to both collaboration and mentoring. The passive/aggressiveness and power over tussles can be suffocating. Why not adopt a child and then do art? Learn how to be selfless then collaborate.

Nicolás: Would you mind talking about the Summer Saint Camp? The reason I am asking is because, since I have never attended a camp session, I am curious as to how you would define the work you do there with students? Do you see it as mentoring?

Linda: It was the SUMMER SAINT CAMP that I offered for 16 days during 7 years of 7 YEARS OF LIVNG ART. It was wonderful, I was a saint, they were saints, there was no power over stuff going on, no tension, no un-monastic attitudes by myself or the participants, no money issues...LOL! But all kidding aside, my intention was good and there were 2 reasons:

1. I wanted to share what I was learning from my work with the chakras (at the time I arrogantly was sure that I had invented the chakras!) and

2. I wanted to have contact with other artists because I was living alone and knew that inviting company to live with me and practicing hospitality was healthy and healing. But as far as THE SUMMER SAINT CAMP being perfect or that I was a super-mentor, you would have to interview the 20 or so people who attended and ask their opinion of the experience. And mentoring now, as I age? I feel I am harder to deal with and I think I was more utopian and sharing back then and more co-creative. Now i'm more of a nudge and it's a control freak attitude that creeps into the psyche as death nudges closer...it is fear disguised as attention to detail and being in control. 

Nicolás: What is mentoring and what are the guidelines for a respectful mentorship in the arts; in art and life?

Linda: Try to trace your ideas and credit the source; try to thank the gurus; try to thank the work and not get so god-goddess-like; try to relax about the whole art thing which can become a war and not a walk of beauty.

Nicolás: Any thoughts for sustaining a healthy, long-term, mentor-mentee relationship?

Linda: Give nice gifts? Ask, "Is there anything I can do for you? " Go to them once a year and do 3 days of free seva. Footnote and mention them inside the article you are writing. Then pass on your tricks of the trade to somebody else coming along and vow not to get jealous when their star reaches further into the limelight than yours.

Nicolás: For a long time I have been experimenting with expanding the concept of collaboration and mentorship outside of the confines of the arts. It is obvious that you have been a pivotal figure at the forefront of this approach, can you tell us the benefits a young artist can derive from working with mentors who don’t see or define themselves or what they do as art?

Linda: Benefits are that the artist can relax because there is no power struggle or fear that the mentee might outstar them so it is a total win-win. 

Nicolás: When I speak of young artists or artists from a younger generation, I am talking about individuals who are relatively new to the arts. These terms are not necessarily meant to refer to their physical age. I am trying to avoid using labels like: emerging artist, mid-career artist, for example. These labels can be confining. What is the “youngest” and the “oldest” person you have mentored?

Linda: I am a good baby whisperer and I do that whenever I can. My best friend from India let me mentor her in a spiritual practice when she was in her 80s and she was already an advanced practitioner. I was elated. It is obvious that some of us are teachers and sharers and if we take good care of ourselves intentionally, mentally, physically, psychologically, then we can do our thing without strife. Labels like mid-emerging are a form of bullying.

Nicolás: One of the most important lessons I have learned about the mentorship you have done with me is that this requires honesty, open communication, and one’s ability to trust the other. Would you like to add anything to this

Linda: Remind me how to do this when we work together again.

Nicolás: I know that you do mentoring live, and through the internet. What other ways of mentoring besides these two have you developed?

Linda: Writing/video/performing.

Nicolás: What is your advice to people who are new to mentoring: mentors and mentees?

Linda: Work with someone and see what happens. Tell them about your influences and people who held your hand throughout your stumblings. Have a baby or adopt one or caregive your parents.

Nicolás: I thank you for your guidance for almost seven years! I remember contacting you through e-mail in 2006. I was then working at Yaddo on a series of pilgrimages and related actions. And I remember hearing a voice telling me “Get in touch with Linda. Reach out to Linda.” And here we are! 

Linda: LOL, I'm laughing because you are claiming that you did pilgrimages before you met me! And by claiming that publically in this interview, you are saying that the pilgrimage work that I did imitated your work, right? See Nicolás, this whole interview that you designed and led me into participating in was a Touche! and a way for you to say that you did it first and that maybe you, Nicolás, are the mentor!!!! We are such complex beings, so wanting to claim CREATION when there is only the ONE DIVINE ARTIST who we imitate! But all said and done, it is fun playing mentor/mentee with you and maybe it's time for us to find a therapist? 
Make it a priest and we can both go to confession!

Nicolás: Linda, this makes me sad that you think this way. You are misinterpreting me. The voice I heard telling me to call you when I was at Yaddo meant to publicly acknowledge that you had tread the path before. I have a great deal to learn from you, and I am glad we connected. You have given me wings and, at times have given me a reassuring push off the cliff so I can try flying, rather than conceptualizing over and over the way one sometimes does with ART. I am borrowing the use of caps from you because I see astronomical differences between Art, ART and art. For the last seven years we have worked very closely together and I will always thank you for being first, for going over table manners with me (and I always thought of myself as knowing how to use well my silverware, napkins and glassware), for guiding me through the footnoting process (this makes me rethink some of the rigorous, academic training I have undergone), and for being a generous friend and mentor to me. The Chicago Manual does not necessarily work in real life or when engaging in the process you have been calling for decades, art in everyday life. This is part of my confession. Do you still want to go to see a priest or should we head to a couple’s therapist? You can have the last word(s). But just remember you are my BIG ART HONCHO MAMA!

Linda: Awww shucks, Nicolás, you are the best. 

Nicolás: No, you are, Linda.

Linda: Blessings, my son. 

Nicolás: Linda, I have been looking forward to this conversation. I hope that this allows for shedding light on ideas that are difficult to articulate in the arts: God, aging, death, ego… Thank you for giving me the yes to ask these questions. You share the title of Saint of the Arts with Saint Catherine of Bologna, a Poor Clare nun from the fifteenth century. In your case, I see you as the Saint of Everyday Life. In some of your writings you talk about performance artists as saints, can you tell us more about it?

Linda: I always loved it when this one evangelical pastor I used to watch on TBN would call everyone in his viewing/TV audience, "Saints." Why? We all rise to the level of our name (You have 5 names, NDERE!!!!  Nicolas so you must know about that!!) When I was a child my father called me Sarah Bernhardt because I was so dramatic, I suppose?  When I entered the convent for 2 years my name was changed to Sister Rose Augustine. Then when I went to an Ashram I was called first Padmavati, then Chinmayananda by my Guru, Shri Brhramanda Saraswati, because he made me a sunyasin. I know of one local business where all of the people working there have "nick names."  I gave myself 7 names of fictional people in 1977 when I made the video Learning to Talk. And then when I began impersonating real people, I called myself Bobbie Dylan, Mother Teresa and Paul McMahon because of these 3 "real" people I now imitate.

Artists are SAINTS.  Lifeists (people who make life a work of art) are Saints also.  We are all saints, that is, we are all fabulous/nothing special/wonderful/filled with the Holy Spirit/carriers of Divine Life.  We rise to the occasion of our names and because my father would not allow me to take ANOTHER name at Confirmation when Catholic teens are asked to choose a Saint's name to add to their own name, I have played with NAME CHANGE AS ART for a long time to FIX that early childhood issue. I took the name power into my own hands. But truly, I feel we are ALL SAINTS: ARTISTS AND LIFEISTS BOTH, 

Wikipedia says:

"Author John A. Coleman S.J. of the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California wrote that saints across various cultures and religions have the following family resemblances:

1. exemplary model

2. extraordinary teacher

3. wonder worker or source of benevolent power

4. intercessor

5. a life often refusing material attachments or comforts

6. possession of a special and revelatory relation to the holy"

On the other hand, Linda says:

We all have been one of the above one time or another, therefore, we are ALL SAINTS.

Nicolás: So much has been shifting for me as a result of your teachings and guidance and our conversations. You always push me to get out of the comfort zone and to inhabit that space where things might not be quite right for the time being. The space that I am describing obviously entails questions of values previously held as dear.  For example, fool was the young me who though I was creating instead of serving as an instrument for the Creator to flow through me. Can you please shed some light on the ingrained perception of the artist as creator?

Linda: My therapist tells me that I am a narcissist!!!!! I rebuke that and ask her why she says this and she said, "All artists are narcissists."  I have thought about that and I think it is about our ability to live in/be directed from/rely on/take orders from intuition and the right brain. Call that being an instrument of the Creator??? Call that being right brain directed???? Call that living intuitively and transgressively??  I love the words of this current young woman ecologist from Sweden, Greta Thunberg, who has Asperger’s. She says that she is different because of her supposed "learning disorder" but watch her fly in the face of the untruths of the world, saying that she can be herself because she can't be like anyone else because of her  "learning disorder."  She is my current saint-heroine-artist-lifeist.  Artists can’t help themselves. We listen to a different channel: call that the channel of Creator/intuition/narcissistic banter? All I know is that I am in the Greta Fan Club for sure. The school of outsider. She is so close to the Creator, and is a walking-talking Saint. May I be blessed by her.

Nicolás: God forbid one, as a contemporary artist, mentions God in one’s work. But it may be that it is not so much so anymore and that you and a handful of others have been part of this change. I recall that one of the implicit prescriptions for making it into the arts for my generation was not to bring God into the equation. That did not work for me and I ended up going to theology school after receiving an MFA. You were first a Catholic nun and then an artist. How did one path followed the other for you, or were they always intertwined?

Linda: We alllllllllllllllllll  mimic our enculturation.  We all do what was done to/in us. My narrative is this GOD-NUN-SAINT backstory because that's my training and formation. It is NOTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT  GOOD-BETTER-BEST, in fact it might be worse-horrible-a hypocritical farce. When I went to grad school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I thought I was cool and stopped being me and dropped my loved-roots. Now I have learned better and I am just doing ME, the me that was trained into me, in this small village, the small Catholic Church, the small Catholic school. It isn't because the word God or my supposed holy-Linda game is good-better-best...it is just that THAT is my schtick! The problem is, it's becoming culturally/aesthetically easier, trendy and au courant for all artists to flaunt the God-schtick. As a result, billions are jumping on THAT bandwagon, getting all schmoozy-spiritual and God-ish!!!  That is not the WAY.  Being true to your own neurosis is the Way. LOL. "All is well, all is well, all manner of things are well." St. Julian of Norwich. 

Nicolás: There are some common grounds between the people that I am interviewing for With Gratitude. Like Chip Conley, you have worked with the subject of masks. I attended your performance at the Gershwin Hotel in New York focused on masks on and masks off. Chip talks about masks coming off as we become elders, and the freedom that this process confers on us. Can art help us discard those masks that no longer serve us or does one as an artist have to watch carefully for the masks that one’s trade might demand?

Linda: A woman over 60 who "uses " her body as/in/with performance is nobody to ask about masks!  We are up to our necks working that out: working out the reality of the aging female performance-body-artist. Talk about addiction to the beautiful sack of shit that we are! Just throw in a few wrinkles/smelly breath/sagging breasts/papier mache skin upper arms and the game of pride is on! I think Carolee did the fragile Art of Aging so beautifully by presenting her failing-feebleness so honestly....never APOLOGIZING. My bobble-head dystonia condition is insisting that I can't hide anymore....and I tremble toward my grave, mask askance, as if drunk from life. Do men feel the same I wonder? But now I can’t say "men", I have to say they? Their? Them? Right?

Nicolás: When I think of you, Linda, and your work, the image that comes to my mind is that of a person who has done whatever the heck she wanted to while being responsible, and being careful not to hurt herself or others. This not hurting oneself or others has been a valuable piece of advice from you. You have worked with aging, with dying, physical illness, losing a tenure track job, but also with the joys of life. I remember once when I approached you about doing something together and you suggested: “Let’s be angels for three days.” For me, aging has brought anxiety and fear of life. I am working on it and writing affirmations and gratitude everyday, and praying and meditating, and crossing myself before leaving home, and doing lovingkindness. Where do you find courage to do what you do?

Linda: Inhaling and exhaling while I watch Netflix.

Nicolás: When we met for the first time at your Art/Life Institute in Kingston, NY, you prayed aloud and baked a pie. I was puzzled by the way your prayer outlined friendship, collaboration and honesty. Your prayer disarmed my ego-driven path as a younger artist. Prayer is another one of the taboos in the art world that you have effaced. Would you be willing to talk about the role of prayer in your art-life?

Linda: I find "talking" a chore, a façade, a joke, an impossible fight for who is right-wrong-smarter-more informed. Silence and prayer are my weapons of choice although I play-act "talking" when I am totally forced to do so. Writing is fine, praying is fine, singing is fine, performing as if talking is fine, lying down in silence is fine but Talking ……. uck!  That's just me.  But then again it's all prayer and I shouldn't be so allergic to sitting in a restaurant and discussing a movie should I? Others are formed by family to converse/talk/share words/form ideas via sound. I was not. Plus as a nun I didn't talk for 2 years. And living with Pauline for 8 years, I swear on a stack of Bibles, that we just  LISTENED!!!! And so I find conversing totally foreign. For that reason I live alone and spend all of my time in silence with birds and trees. 

Nicolás: Can I ask about the Holy Ghost? I am in love with this aspect of the Trinity that in theory is neither male nor female, but gender fluid, and which can travel through bodies and be channeled into art. Who is the Holy Spirit for you? I now understand performance art as the act of manifesting this aspect of the Creator. I would like to hear your thoughts about this.

Linda: The Holy Spirit is my God-Bird of choice. Why do you think I like Chickens so much?

Nicolás: I thank you, Linda, my dear Art Mom, for your love, guidance and teaching. I am extremely grateful for how you have kicked me in the butt and woken me up to a creative path where the limit is respect, and I too would LOVE to be an angel with you for three days. THANK YOU from the core of the pineal gland, the seat of the soul.

Linda: You are getting so roguish NDERE:  you said  "heck" earlier in your questions;  you said  "butt" just now and then you threw in the "pineal" word. And ended with "seat". Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm  You little Holy-Saint-Rascal you!!

In Art=Life=Love / Chicken Linda / Saugerties NY, 2019

This Q&A was first published online with Art in Odd Places 2019, Invisible, curated by LuLu LoLo

Linda Mary Montano: Laughing people always amazed me!  How do they do it? Why do they do it?  When do they do it?  Who taught them to do it?  I grew up almost Zen-monkishly in a Catholic household with parents fresh out of the 1930s depression and an aunt dead from the Spanish Flu, 1918. Also Catholics know that Sin is just around the corner so it was mentored that I better not have fun, or pleasure, or enjoyment or play. After my husband, my mother, my adopted mother and then my father, Henry Montano died, my joy-fulcrum was buried and I knew that I needed an intervention so when I was made aware of a Laughter Course with Steve Wilson, I signed up immediately, drove to Atlantic City for the 2 day training and slept in my Outback at night. Since then, Laughter has been a material, methodology and practice that I use in workshops/performances and my volunteering with children, elders and the incarcerated. I still don't smile much but I know how to raise my laughter endorphins when needed or wanted. Try it. Most likely you can learn for free from YouTube. It is magic. 

Nicolás: Upon concluding our dinner at Critical Practices Inc., I asked the group to laugh, laugh and laugh, as an homage to Linda Mary Montano my friend and mentor of many years and her teachings. One of the guests went to the bathroom in the hallway and got locked out. She sat on the steps. When she was able to get back into the loft, she told us that our laughter carried out into the hallways of the building. Linda was not with us in person but she kindly e-mailed this text on laugher for this publication. 

This piece was first published in a limited edition publication produced by Critical Practices Inc. (CPI), as part of The P Word, a solo-collaborative exhibition by Nicolás and Friends, 2017

Montano says: “We all age. This is inevitable. Artists age, non-artists age. As a performance artist, my body is, has been and will always be my canvas, my clay, my paint, my material, and aging has brought an incredible menu to the table...a smorgasburg of physical, mental, physical, psychological and spiritual issues for me to choose from and work with and present to myself and others. One such issue is THE NURSING HOME! The dreaded last stop for many of us. And my theory is that if we prepare now, if we take care of our fears and angers and betrayals and jealousies, and rages. NOW while we can still transform these obscurations into acceptance, then we will make it easier on the 40847 UNDERPAID nurses aides and caregivers who will feed, bathe and change our Depends. My presentation is an opportunity to bring up this subject as a discussion and then together watch my video NURSE NURSE, with participation from the audience as nurses and other personas that the video elicits. This presentation will last about one hour and it is not only a transformational experience but also a chance to heal unspoken fears and terrors regarding the fear of dying and death itself. After the event we will have a Q and A.”

This text was written by Linda Mary Montano as she prepared to perform at the Elizabeth Foundation Project Space for As Far as the Heart Can See, 2018

Linda Mary Montano and Nicolás Dumit Estévez will arrive and leave the ______________________ airport as winged angels. While in _________________________, during their three day performance, they will interact angelically with those they encounter along their path, inviting others to realize that they are angels too. These meetings will take place throughout the downtown and nearby areas, for example _______________________ and _____________________. To communicate more sensitively, Montano and Estévez will use visual and soft language. The angels will appear publicly from 12:00 noon to 3:00 pm on three consecutive days. 

DAD

Linda Mary Montano and Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful

FROM LINDA MARY MONTANO: NICOLÁS, we talked about your father in our last phone conversation. I was interested in the fact that BOTH of our fathers suffered from racism and it interests me that this ancestral heritage we both share has influenced our art and life. Both of our fathers were VERY INCREDIBLE and we both loved our fathers. Let’s interview each other about them. I will send you two questions and I will answer the same questions. Let our fathers be honored by not only ourselves but by our friends who read this wonderful homage which you have so beautifully and generously presented. Thank you my art brother. Linda

Briefly tell your father’s story

Linda Mary Montano: HENRY JOSEPH MONTANO was born in Saugerties NY. on December 8, 1912. His mother Maria Ciocco and father Louis Montano migrated from Guardialfiera, Italy in the late 1800s. Grandpa came first and worked in shoe repair at a relative’s shop in Hudson, NY, until he payed off his boat fare. Then he came to the other side of the Hudson River, tried Coxsackie but settled in Saugerties, 45 minutes south where he opened a shoe store. Dad was their third child and photos of him reveal an incredibly handsome and strong minded person with a movie star aura. He maintained those strong features and a magnetic charisma his entire life but it was an aura that was monk-like, that is, his level of deep inner quiet and DEVOTION were palpable. Around my dad was a kind of holiness which every person who came to his shoe store personally experienced because the store was more like a healing center, a Church where an attitude of professional service to all customers was consistent and constant. When you went to MONTANO’s Shoe Store you were somewhat entering a healing center-Church and my Dad was the Cardinal presiding. 

After high school Dad’s wish was to become a dentist but the person he asked for money did not loan the money to him so when his father asked him to help him at Grandpa’s store, Dad honored his father and agreed.

Dad was also a musician and played drums and sang in a band with his brothers and eventually chose trumpet as his instrument. Mom sang in Dad’s band. 

Dad’s siblings were Joe, Louis, Dad, Ula , Eddie, and others who died as infants. During the 1918 pandemic Ula died when she was 3, Dad was 6 years old. And the story is that Dad carried a “guilt” feeling that he had killed Ula which indicates that he had most likely been sick during the flu and thought he had given it to her, a typical misconception which children tragically carry. Shortly before he died as I was caregiving him, and I luckily was able to explain to him the truth of his no-fault and this was a memorable healing situation in our history. 

Dad the musician co-organized a drum and bugle corps and they played in local parades for 14 years making a historic appearance at the SAINT PATRICKS DAY PARADE in NYC.  ( See THE FATHER HARTY DRUM CORPS  on YouTube.)  My memories of him listening to trumpet records, big band, Ella, and initiating me into SOUND as a language deeper than words will always be something I treasure deeply because  we all communicated in our home via sonic waves, not words. Sound without sentences were our practice because Dad did not use verbal language......his methodology was his presence and vibrational frequency and I often have memories that we grew up in a monastery, a holy one.

Dad really could have been a monk in that his devotion to the Catholic Church was palpable, that is, I learned by watching him relate to the Sacred and that was a uniquely impressive heartfelt teaching. His love of Blessed Mother was obvious and after his stroke in his late 80s, when I showed him a  photo of Padre Pio, he said, “Oh that’s JOE PIO, he’s the one who came to help me“ ( during his stroke). Another indication of his piety, he suggested we say the family Rosary and we did so in the living room, kneeling. 

Although an astute “business man” I remember Dad’s humble, impeccable GOODNESS. He NEVER EVER talked negatively about anyone. Never swore. Never cheated anyone. 

To conclude this portrait it is imperative to know that Mom and Dad were a team and he allowed her incredibly persistent need to create (music and painting) and flower in his and our world.  

To conclude, this man of few words had two prophecies. One was. “WATER IS THE REAL GOLD.”   The other:  “ONE DAY THERE WILL BE LOOTING AND FIGHTING ON THE STREETS FOR FOOD.” I’m not sure these are exactly his correct words.  

ADDITION: After Dad retired he did many outside yard work things until he began spending more time in his easy chair in the living room where he sat next to his music console and there he  cassette taped literally hundreds of his favorite songs from radio stations. His technique would be to hear a song on the radio and quickly turn on his cassette machine. There are hundreds of them still next to his chair in the house.  His ability to give his attention to sound and beauty and music and not to the mind worries that come from aging and sickness and eventual death truly inspire me NOW and remind me of his courage to let music give him inner joy. 

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful:  My father, Nicolás, was born in the Dominican Republic and we may have connections to Venezuela through the Espejo last name that he carried so well. Espejo means mirror. We also have connections to Haiti through the Belliard last name. The image that surfaces for me when I think of my father is that of an elegant and tall man, always well dressed and with a gait that instilled respect from others. He thought highly of himself and that showed in the way he walked and the presence he assumed in life: eyes looking forward–ahead, feet grounded in his polished shoes and a pair of glasses that framed his face with style. I got my first name from my father. The story goes that my mother wanted for me to have two Lebanese names or a French and a Lebanese name, and my father went ahead and called me Nicolás. Although my mother loves the Dominican Republic to an extreme, she is so embedded in Lebanese culture, so much that the other day she left a message to remind me not to forget that I was really an Arab. I listened to it and laughed knowing of the truth these words carried in very nuanced ways. I forgot to mention before that my father had a twin who was named Eufemio. I recall his portrait in an old frame that could be rotated around a wooden base. I like his name so much that I secretly felt called to take on his name, but I did not know how to do so. The day my father’s twin died, my father and he were in different locations and my father got a fever as his brother was dying. This to me speaks of the connections that can manifest in twins. Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and my father’s face surfaces through mine…although at first sight I do not look like him. My father had very dark skin and I look more like my mother, who traces her roots to the Middle East and perhaps to Europe as well. My father would be considered Black in the United Sates, and while we experienced racial issues together in the Caribbean, we did not talk about them in detail. My father embodied the complexity of the Caribbean to the core. Once he told me that a nurse he knew offered to help him move to the United States and to help him get documents as a resident, and that he rejected her proposal. I cannot picture him outside of the gorgeous island in which both of us were born, Quisqueya, the cradle of all lands. I ended up leaving the place and I might return. I thirst for colors, flavors, sounds, textures and ways of being that can only be experienced in the Caribbean. I keep thinking of my responsibility to return to the sandy cemetery where my father is buried to fix and embellish his grave. He was a practicing Catholic and also kept ties with some of the African spiritualities that are part of the island.

Was he treated negatively? How?

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful:  I recall my father presenting himself to the world as a proud person. Gosh! I do not like the word proud or pride. It might be the Catholic thing that considers pride not as a virtue. I am thinking… My father had presence. Being tall, elegant, dark and sophisticated, he exuded great confidence. That is the word, confidence. Nicolás probably never completed primary school, and he read the papers daily and spoke with eloquence and knew about world’s affairs. He could hold a conversation with a wide circle of people from all backgrounds. Growing up, and still now, class is so embedded in Dominican culture. Sometimes it seems that class has a tighter grip on culture there than race. If one is Black and has money, doors can open for one on the Island, and yet racism would show its face sooner or later. The one in my family with the last name which opened doors (and still does) is my mother. Her/our Lebanese last name spells money, fortunes made by immigrants who saved every single penny until they amassed houses, lands, stores… But this was not true of everyone in our family. We did not have money at home, although we did receive some of its benefits and privileges by proxy. So, my father’s last name, Estévez, was a common Spanish last name that did not mean much when it came to politics and influence. I would use this last name intermittently, depending on what I needed to get done. I did not use the name Nicolás until I came to live in the United States and that is my first name in my birth certificate. I would be called Nicolás in college in New York, and it eventually took off. My father Nicolás may have intuited that he was seen as lesser, although he surrounded himself by a group of distinguished friends, from well-known medical doctors to recognized lawyers, with whom he had close bonds. I used to visit some of their places and could see how much they loved and respected my father for who he really was and not for what he did not have. Being a first generation Lebanese immigrant, my mother would take the lead and initiate with anything dealing with finances, such as buying houses; and she also had her family to assist her to some extent. This is not to say that she was not extremely hardworking, and at almost 80, still works more than full time. However, my mother thought my father did not have the push to take financial risks, and so, she may have unconsciously rendered him inefficient. I can’t say that Nicolás was treated badly, and yet being older in regards to my mother, dark skinned, and not having the clout to move pieces around like many of my maternal family did, he had a lesser role in the family. He might have compensated for this by telling people exactly what he had in his mind and by not taking anyone’s nonsense, even in such a class stratified place as the Dominican Republic. Nicolás would speak from his heart. I love my father’s gold tooth, his thick farmed glasses, and how he would lean back to read the newspaper under the tropical trees. His pants always had perfect creases, knife-life. He was the king of the city of Santiago, or so it seemed to me. He knew everyone and everyone knew him. I wish my father could be hearing how fond I am of him. I did not really get to expressed that to him while he was alive. I hope that as I write this, he is smiling wherever he is.

THE CHALLENGES OF HENRY JOSEPH MONTANO

by Linda Mary Montano

FIRST CHALLENGE
My father was a first generation Italian of immigrants who came from Italy looking for a way to help find food, work and a way of life easier than what the Rocky Mountain terrain of Campobosso/ Guardialfiera was offering them. So they experienced the resultant Karma of the new immigrants: no language skills, not knowing how to maneuver in America, loss of family and friends, a totally different culture, isolation and fear of making a cultural blunder. My question, before social media which affords a way to see others, stay in touch and cut through the nightmare of new immigrant, this must have been excruciating. The loneliness for Home got imprinted in the family’s DNA???

SECOND CHALLENGE
My grandparents had 5 children and I think more but some died at birth. One of dad’s life challenges was his feeling responsible for the death of his sister Ula, who died of the 1918 flu when she was 3 years old. Dad was six at the time and maybe he had it also? Maybe someone said to him that he caused her to be ill? Who knows. Grandma also had the flu and when she was able to be well enough to leave her sickbed, she was shown a photo of Ula in a coffin. After that heartbreak, Grandma dressed in black, I think forever, and said rosaries in the front room of their home, all afternoon. Dad carried the thought that he caused his little sister’s death until just before he died when he learned that she died of the flu. His relief at this news was palpable. My question: dad’s prayer life was always visible, instructive, holy-making and he went for spiritual direction for years mentoring. That it is wise to seek help when in trouble!

THIRD CHALLENGE
As a child, Dad played with the kids in his neighborhood on Partition Street, very near Nanny Goat Hill. Sociologically speaking, Saugerties was a mix of peoples: the Indigenous, then the Dutch, English, Germans, Irish AND THEN!!!! Then one Jewish family and the Montano family. You get my drift? At the end of dad’s life he told me the kids called him “Guinea,” “Wop,” and “Dago,”  and other unmentionable racist terms. And they beat him up. I asked him how that was for him and in a raspy 90 year old voice he said: “It made me strong!” My question, how do you thank a parent for choosing to be humble when humiliated, for choosing to grow inner strength not self pity!!! We were taught as children of first generation Italians to lay low, make no waves, don’t trust anybody, be good..... rules that all those lowest on the social ladder are cognizant of??? We were taught that dad and his brothers were not chosen to join the army because of their race and the inference that they were or would be spies!!!!  What do we do with this ancestral shame now???? What did they do with it??

FOURTH CHALLENGE
Dad and his brothers started a family music band and i’m sure helped the family financially. But money was an issue.  Grandpa opened the shoe store in 1906 and when dad finished high school he wanted to become a dentist, seeking his own path and gifts for medicine and healing. He wanted that deeply enough that he had the Courage to ask a wealthy person in town for a loan so that he could go to dental school, of course with a promise to repay them. When that request was denied, dad stayed on in the store where he was already working and helped Grandpa in the store recover from the ‘30s financial depression.  My question: how do you thank parents who devoted their entire lives to deferring their own dreams, while providing food, clothing, higher education, etc, for four of their children??? How do you thank a father who donated to many charities, food banks, bailed people out of doctor and pharmacy bills??? All of this done secretly !!! I have no answer to this question!!!

FIFTH CHALLENGE
Deferring,  choosing to be loyal to their job, never thinking of their own comfort or time or needs...both dad and mom devoted themselves to Duty, devoted themselves to their children, devoted themselves to giving...for example, dad and Dick Thornton founded a Drum Corps in Saugerties, called The Father Harry Drum Corps and for 14 years Mom and Dad kept it functioning as a vibrant place where the children of Saugerties could truly shine!!!! I wish I could have asked him how he dealt with the fact that he couldn’t march with them because he was working in the shoe store!!  The question: I always felt that our family lost one of the cultural wonderful stereotypical GIFTS of being Italian.....the big hellos, the hugs, the eating together, the joy of Celebrating Life in a very open, full and expansive way. My question: did Grandpa and Grandma Montano leave all of that Italian Joy back in Italy and did moving to America in an environment of racism and suspicion drain it out of us? I ask because I feel those same ancestral mantras..... “ BE CAREFUL.  DON’T MAKE WAVES. REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE NOT!!!”

OUR CHALLENGE
We now as recipients of family karmas and stories have inner and outer questions and a lifelong assignment to offer GRATITUDE to our ancestors, to offer tears they couldn’t cry, to offer a vow to heal their wounds of shame, fear and guilt and to heal our own shadows as well. And we are assigned to offer Hearts of Compassion to ourselves as we watch that compassion waft back in time toward our grandparent, our parents and into ourselves. And DAD and MOM. GRANDMA and GRANDPA. Wherever you are, Eat Spaghetti and sing and hug and joyfully CELEBRATE and do it LOUD.

Postscript:  Just recently I realized that my father created an ART THERAPY RETRIEVAL  of his childhood story of having been racially bullied and beaten up by the children in his small upstate, NY, village because he is Italian and his parents spoke no English. Then he was “ bullied” again by the US GOVERNMENT when he was denied being inducted into the Army because he would be considered a liability and potential spy. Supposedly there was an Italian “spy”  here in the area and they were taking no chances and rejecting all of the 4 Montano boys supposing they would also be “Italian “ spies!!! So here is the ART THERAPY RETRIEVAL. Dad, the musician, saw a need in Saugerties for activities for young boys who needed direction and positive activities. As a result, Dad and Dick Thornton founded and kept going for 14 years THE FATHER HARTY DRUM CORPS. They wore recycled army uniforms dyed green, helmets and marched with American flags. Not for war but for peace! See YouTube THE FATHER HARTY DRUM CORPS. The result of Dad’s creation was therapeutic and homeopathic for him. That is, Dad took negative bullying and turned it around and truly performed an ART THERAPY fix by creating this magnificent marching band!!! He had been denied his desire to serve his country in the army because of racism SO he gathered young men who MARCHED IN BEAUTY playing incredibly moving music. He didn’t  march in war but  for 14 years marched in sonic beauty and peace. Little did my Dad know that both he and my incredibly  creative mother were teaching me how to make good art from the OYE VEYS of daily life!!!! I am tearfully grateful, blessed and honored to be their daughter.

Linda Mary Montano 2022.  Holy Thursday

Images above courtesy of Linda Mary Montano and Nicolás

WHAT: Montano and Estévez will live/perform for 21 days at ________________________ in appreciation of the deep mystical gifts of St. Teresa of Ávila & St John of the Cross, two Roman Catholic saints of the 16th century who lived in Spain. To honor these two mystics, Montano and Estévez will read from their books, THE INTERIOR CASTLE, by Teresa of Ávila; & THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL, by St John of the Cross. The readings will take place outside, in nature.  They will read softly, and at designated times to be determined once they arrive at the residency. They will read every day to and for the chickens, sky, birds, flowers, grass, goats, crickets and raccoons and for any other creatures who will listen to them..

WHY: Because at this time we are ALL in need of spiritually intelligent and advanced mentors to guide us through the perilousness of our own political/personal lives, we are intending that the information we read will teach us humility/compassion and the animals and nature will be adjunct teachers to us as well!

VOWS:

1. As artists, Montano and Estévez will honor the lives of these two  saints and will "endure" via a daily time component by performing for 14 days.

2. We also will add the vow of keeping silence with each other except for absolutely necessary talking for the time there.

3. We will eat simply, in keeping with the Discalced Carmelite vow of simplicity. 

The vows we are taking allow for focus, mindfulness and self-purification, which are the goals of this healing performance.

VISUALS: Montano and Estévez will wear dignified clothes which are symbolic of their spiritual purpose. We will sit on chairs as we read, walk slowly when out in nature so we can not only demonstrate inner equanimity but train ourselves in that virtue as well.

All of the elements are kept extremely simple and disciplined out of respect  for the saints we are honoring and the creatures of nature we are studying/collaborating with.

In Art=Life=Love

THE END

Linda: I can’t believe that we created this document about our art and life and you made it visible. You are definitely a saint.

Nicolás: May you always be blessed.

Free SAINT CERTIFICATE for ALL / Love Linda and Nicolás

A PERFORMANCE ART SAINT OF LIFE AND ART CERTIFICATE

I, Name:_______________________ HEREBY DECLARE THAT I AM A BONAFIDE PERFORMANCE ARTIST 

AND THAT I MAKE AN ART OF MY LIFE AND MY LIFE IS A WORK OF ART.

MY DWELLING IS A WORK OF ART, MY JOB IS A WORK OF ART, MY RELATIONSHIPS ARE WORKS OF ART, MY FEELINGS ARE WORKS OF ART AND I OFTEN DO NOT NEED TO DOCUMENT THESE PRACTICES BUT SIMPLY LIVE THEM AS LIFE/ART. I AM AN  ART SAINT.

LINDA MARY MONTANO HAS WITNESSED MY DEDICATION TO ART AND LIFE AND HAS DECLARED THAT I AM WORTHY OF THIS PRETIGIOUS TITLE: SAINT. I WILL NEVER DOUBT MY TITLE AND I WILL CONTINUE TO ACT SAINTLY IN MY LIFE AND A

THIS CERTIFICATE IS BESTOWED ON ME BY: LINDA MARY MONTANO

FOUNDER OF THE ART/LIFE INSTITUTE & TRANSFIGURATION HOSPITAL  
                                                                                

LINDA MARY MONTANO

To print your SAINT CERTIFICATE click HERE