We re-created radical covers from High Performance, the L.A. magazine made for and by artists

In 1978, after eating LSD-laced garlic butter toast and while crouched under a piano during a performance, artists Linda Frye Burnham and Richard Newton decided to start a magazine. Called High Performance, it would become one of a handful of magazines in Los Angeles at the time that documented ephemeral art and functioned as an alternative space for performance artists.

According to Newton, Los Angeles was considered an outsider outpost in an art world dominated by New York City. “Performance art was a blip on the cultural radar,” says Newton. High Performance directly countered that and helped put Los Angeles, quite literally, on the map.

The first issue features a black-and-white photograph by Susan Mogul of artist Suzanne Lacy, dressed in a helmet and yellow jumpsuit during her 1976 performance, “Cinderella in a Dragster,” which involved her driving a dragster from L.A. to San Diego, stopping at Cal State Dominguez Hills, where she rapidly delivered a “metaphorical tale about speed, travel, art-making, and fairy tale-telling,” according to the front pages of the inaugural issue. Elsewhere in the issue is an interview with Newton, listings for future events, and reviews and photos of performances in New York, Europe and, of course, Los Angeles. It was printed at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in downtown Los Angeles, just a few months after the now-legendary performance art space had opened in January of ’78. From 1983 to 1995, High Performance was published by Astro Artz, renamed 18th Street Arts Center in 1990, and a bastion of performance art to this day.

Suzanne Lacy, “Cinderella in a Dragster,” 1976, High Performance #1 Vol. I, No. 1, 1978.

(Linda Frye Burnham; Photo by Susan Mogul)

“We used to have this joke, and I can’t remember who said it first but it was, ‘the undocumented life is not worth living,’ and we were laughing at ourselves because we realized we had to document what we were doing,” says Anne Gauldin, one of the three of five remaining and active members of the group Sisters of Survival along with Cheri Gaulke and Jerri Allyn, who would appear on the cover of the magazine’s 1983 issue. The group, which originally included members Sue Maberry and Nancy Angelo, was an influential presence at the Woman’s Building, a collective hub for feminist art in Los Angeles in the ’70s and ’80s.

“That’s what High Performance was, it was a place […] where any artist who was doing a performance, no matter how large or small, would write their own account of what happened,” Gauldin adds. That an artist controlled the narrative behind their own work was both novel and groundbreaking at a time when the art market was just beginning to dominate the gallery scene.

This past January, the Performance Art Museum, a roving museum devoted to spreading awareness around performance art in L.A. and beyond, launched a two-year conference around the history of High Performance and the magazine. “We view the museum as a bridge,” says PAM director Samuel Vasquez. “For this initiative we’re asking, ‘How can we connect the history of performance art to contemporary artists?’”

“What I mostly miss in my day-to-day life is community,” says Newton, who adds that the reading group, organized by PAM, has been a highlight of his year. “I’m really grateful for High Performance and that I was a part of it and that it’s still relevant.”

The many covers of High Performance magazine, which ran from 1978 to 1997.

(Linda Frye Burnham)

Performance art, like community building, costs time and offers presence. In a city like Los Angeles, where time is often measured by how long it takes to drive across town, community takes form through deliberate support and participation. According to Lacy and Newton, everyone in the small performance art scene in 1970s-80s Los Angeles attended everyone’s events, and it was easy: Newton attests you could once fly down Melrose going 80 miles per hour, whereas now, community is threatened by the time it takes to get from site to site.

Through its two-year initiative, PAM aims to offer a gathering point for artists, scholars and curators alike. “We’re building a scaffolding of support for performance art,” says Vasquez. “More important than opening this museum is how we are strengthening the field of performance.” Case in point: For the year, PAM is working alongside Lacy for “Cinderella Redux,” a continuation of Lacy’s “Cinderella in a Dragster” performance.

For this story, Image collaborated with the Performance Art Museum and artist Tyler Matthew Oyer to honor and re-create three of High Performance’s radical covers, featuring Lacy, Newton and Sisters of Survival. In a full circle moment, these photo shoots took place at 18th Street Arts Center, the longtime home to High Performance. And in the spirit of connecting this history to the present, three contemporary performance artists based in L.A. — Carmen Argote, Kayla Tange and Da Ron Vinson — created their own covers in response. It’s part of the bridge Vasquez says the Performance Art Museum intends to build, where time and presence and performance offer community and connection in a city constantly redefining itself.

Suzanne Lacy

Suzanne Lacy, “Cinderella Redux,” 2026, a continuation of her 1976 performance “Cinderella in a Dragster” originally featured on the cover of High Performance issue #1, 1978.

I came from a time when we were all involved in a lot of experimentation, and when I was asked to redo this piece as part of [PAM’s] High Performance [initiative], it felt like a way to reconnect with Los Angeles. I do a lot of work in Europe and Asia and South America, and it felt like a way to re-explore a mode of practice that is personal and experiential.

I’ve got sort of the car trajectory, which is finding it, buying it, repairing it and learning how to drive it, and then driving it. Then the second part of it is the persona that’s created, and the community along the way that gets built, or the persona. I’m thinking through how much of this should be diaristic. It’s definitely a reflection on where I’m at, at this point in my career.

When I was being photographed the other day, I moved into that part of my persona that is kind of like, “Yeah, I’ll show you this. Yeah, I’m a tough bitch.” In terms of re-creating, I’m definitely not doing the same piece. That piece was about the narrative I delivered. It was a rolling series of associations, first about time and then about travel, time and movement, and how that fit into being a performance artist. And the Cinderella metaphor comes in because Cinderella created a pumpkin into a chariot that became a fantasy world, and she lived it like I was living in the race car world at that time.

The idea of manifesting oneself through one’s work was part of the West Coast feminist movement. So one of the things I’ll be exploring is the development of the Cinderella self, 50 years since I did [“Cinderella in a Dragster”]. How has that shaped who I am now, and how does that come out of a California experience?

Carmen Argote

Carmen Argote, “Untitled,” ongoing performance.

Documentation is an acknowledgment that [the performance] happened but it doesn’t capture the moment it happened in — it adds an extra layer.

[The photo shoot] was such an interesting and weird experience because I was very resistant — I’m not going to pretend to do a performance for the camera. So I thought, what’s the scale of the action? What would feel embodied and connected to the scale of intimacy between a photographer and a subject? I had to narrow it down and discern a moment. For me, it was the moment of transference between my body and the drawings, my body and the camera.

Much of my work is about the psychological and the residue that we carry from generation to generation — things that are in the body that surface through the work.

I came to [High Performance magazine] because of my own increasing desire to do performance art. I had considered myself more interested in sculpture and architecture, or, for example, I have a walking practice. There’s something somatic there. As the trajectory of my work has progressed, the work became more intimate. When it finally went into the psychological, the desire to learn more about other performance artists, to perform myself, to be in that space of attunement, increased.

Sisters of Survival

“Sisters of Survival Signal S.O.S. for the Planet” (Anne Gauldin, Jerri Allyn, Cheri Gaulke), 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, 2026. The original cover, “End of the Rainbow,” an antinuclear performance at the Hagar Qim prehistoric temple, Malta, was originally featured on the cover of High Performance issue #22, 1983.

Anne Gauldin: When we were invited to perform for the kickoff of this two-year honoring of High Performance magazine, it was really exciting to be able to get our habits out of storage. We still had everything, like our signal flags, and it felt really appropriate to use our same visual language of performance art to address some of the same issues [like bodily autonomy, nuclear disarmament].

Jerri Allyn: I think we’re all abhorred by Christian fundamentalism, and when we took on the habits [in 1981], it was not to embrace a Christian image. It was an embracing of an image of sisterhood, of women choosing to collaborate and affirm their connection with each other.

Sisters Of Survival (Anne Gauldin, Jerri Allyn, Cheri Gaulke), High Performance #22 Vol. VI, No. 2, 1983.

(Linda Frye Burnham; Photo by Sue Mayberry)

Cheri Gaulke: Something we learned at the Women’s Building is if what you need out there doesn’t exist, figure out a way to create it. I see a lot of young artists doing that — starting galleries, renting a storefront, or doing pop-ups.

As we’ve been working on this film, “Acting Like Women” [coming out this summer], and looking at the ’70s and ’80s and feminist performance art, we’re connecting the dots to what’s going on today [with protest art], and what we see is a language that we developed back then. It’s almost like activism and performance art are one and the same. You see it at the No Kings marches. What makes it powerful is when people put on costumes and take on personas and do things that make it visual. What’s always important to us is also educating people about the history, our history. Being honored again feels like we’re being seen for developing that kind of language.

Kayla Tange

Kayla Tange, “Head Cage (from the performance Boundaries),” 2017/2026. Headcage by Kayla Tange and Jeff Davis, Stacy Ellen Rich ring.

I used to do a lot of work around boundary violations and confession and work with a lot of really heavy topics, and I still do, but I wonder, what is the antidote to all this heavy material? I think a lot of that is movement, joy and community and finding ways we can live with all this turmoil.

For my photo shoot, I left my hair down and wild instead of pulling it back [as in other iterations of the performance]. I use the name Coco Ono as a performance construct, as a persona, and I use it to distort issues around labor and desire.

I really resonate with the work Jerri [Allyn] has done with Sisters of Survival. She and Anne [Gauldin] were in another group called the Waitresses as many of them actually worked as waitresses at some point. They were all performing about labor, staging radical performances in diners. A lot of the work that they did was creating containers for themselves to make sense of whatever they were personally trying to convey. The collectives I’m in, like the Stripper Co-op, take inspiration — working as a group toward a shared goal. Performance as activism is still very much alive.

Richard Newton

Richard Newton, “My mother left me in a motel room in Brawley and I cried onions,” 2026, an updated version of “I take you to a room in Brawley and we smell onions,” 1975, originally featured on the cover of High Performance issue #7, 1979.

The idea of re-creating [the cover] was almost foreign to me. It was like asking me to step back in time and try to be in a place that already passed. Performance is about staying in the moment. The past is there but it’s gone. I don’t think I’ve ever been a good person to predict the future, but I think I’ve been a very good person at being exactly in the moment.

The stylist [Dominick Barcelona] did a wonderful job re-creating the wardrobe I wore in 1975. Everyone was dedicated to bringing the original experience to life. The performance, “I take you to a room in Brawley and we smell onions,” was created at a time when I had no contact with my mother since age 5 years. My longing to know my mother created a situation where I made artworks and performances in which I looked inside myself to find her and manifest her by becoming her. Recently, although I never met my mother again in this life, I became aware that she had passed on to the afterlife.

Richard Newton, “I take you to a room in Brawley and we smell onions,” 1975, High Performance #7 Vol. II, No. 3, 1979.

(Linda Frye Burnham)

When we progressed to the photo shoot part of our day, I became sad. It was a bittersweet experience. I felt lost. I felt caught between two times. I felt caught between this time where, although I wasn’t in touch with or seeing my mother, I still had this belief that she was out there alive somewhere. And that is to say, I had a mother. She’s not in my life, but I have a mother. Then at the second photo shoot, I realized, I don’t have a mother.

Da Ron Vinson

Da Ron Vison, “Monachopsis #1,” 2026.

I’m invasive with my body, [and] I want the audience to do a little bit more work. That’s part of the reason why my practice started to engage more with audience participation and has started to become much more theatrical. Art should be challenging and it shouldn’t let you off the hook.

One thing performance art can offer us is presence — because you have to stay engaged with [the performer’s] body, in their interiority and their emotion, especially if it’s in a confined space, and it just offers almost a break from reality, but not in an escapist way. The performances I’m engaged in are pointed; they take the veil away.

This photo shoot experience was mythic; it was sort of a site-specific intervention. I didn’t want my outfit to be louder than the curtains. I also wanted to be open enough to have things projected on to me — that concept was important, because I have ideas of my interior of myself and interiority, but I’m also interested in people’s projections of who they believe that I am, especially in theatrical and performance spaces.

Angella d’Avignon is a writer living in Southern California.

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