Performa and the Hartwig Art Foundation announce major institutional partnership

Performa was Founded in 2004 by art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg, Performa is the leading organization dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth-century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century. Since launching New York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05, in 2005, the organization has solidified its identity as a commissioning and producing entity, and as a “museum without walls” providing important art historical heft to the field, showing the development of live art in all its forms and from many different cultural perspectives, reaching back to the Renaissance and beyond. The Performa Biennial is celebrated worldwide as the first biennial to give specialized attention to this remarkable history, transforming the city of New York into the “world capital of artists’ performance” every other November. Performa attracts a national and international audience of more than 200,000 and receives more than 5,000,000 hits on its website during its run of three weeks. In the last 18 years, Performa has presented 592 performances, worked with 732 artists, and has toured commissioned performances in 17 countries around the world.

The Performa Archive features the work of over seven-hundred emerging and established artists from across the United States and around the world. It is a unique enterprise that is both a repository of documentation of Performa’s twenty-year history, as well as an adventurous new entryway to understanding the creative thinking behind the production of new live work for the 21st century. Comprising thousands of hours of original unedited, edited video and sound recordings, photographs, physical and digital ephemera, as well as artists’ drawings, writings, correspondence with curators, interviews, writing and research material, the archive is unusually complete in its full-on reveal of the commissioning and production process, tech riders and timelines included, that result in the renowned Performa commissions presented during each Performa Biennial since 2005. In early 2023 Performa will launch a new public website that offers free and easy access to its extensive holdings of live performance and contemporary art, with additional support from Outset and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Hartwig Art Foundation is active in fostering and facilitating the production, presentation, communication and preservation of contemporary art for society at large, to support the cultural ecosystem in the Netherlands and abroad. The production, presentation, mediation and preservation of art aims, in particular, at the sustainable promotion of a cultural environment for society as a whole, both in terms of infrastructures and people. The Foundation strives for diverse and broad artistic exchange and the continuous advancement of creative production methods of the highest standards while aiming to facilitate a role for arts and culture institutions as places of encounter for all people. In addition to its multiple activities in productions with artists and partnerships with a wide range of institutions, the Hartwig Art Foundation is currently developing a new museum for contemporary art in Amsterdam.