ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that a group of black American women artists along with their male colleagues such as Houston Conwill, David Hammons, Noah Jemison, Lorenzo Pace, Charles Abramson, and Joe Lewis—have deliberately used performance work to enliven and broaden the context for their artistic expression. In the context of the political, economic, and social dialogs of the last twenty years, these artists have been concerned with reaching out to the "community" with their art, and have specifically seen their art as vehicles for political action. The fact that it is mostly women who have been involved in performance art might have something to do with the suspect status that it has within black American art circles. The link that the work of these women provides between black, feminist, and social welfare political camps can be discerned in the oeuvre of an individual like Adrian Piper, whose performance work started in the early 1970s.
