Famed performance artist and Evanston native Karen Finley returns home this month to perform over two weekends as part of Steppenwolf Theatre's LookOut series. It's a visit that provides Finley the chance to look back at past traumas and ahead to current and future fights against the Trump administration.
"I'm thinking about Chicago on so many levels. I'm speaking about it as my home and where I started doing political activism," said Finley, grateful to hear that the spirit of protest is alive and well around the Windy City—especially with students at Evanston High School recently staging a walkout as a reaction to Trump's divisive executive orders.
"Times are repeating themselves," Finley said. "I remember doing the same thing."
Finley's first piece making a Chicago debut is Written in Sand: Collected AIDS Writings. It's drawn from her personal essays and performance pieces that were reactions to friends and loved ones who were devastated by the disease in the 1980s and '90s.
"At that time, I was writing or speaking out as a witness because I could," Finley said. "Now there isn't that same kind of urgency, but that is also one of the reason I'm performing this work as a witness for the younger generation."
Finley is also immensely grateful that the current exhibit Art AIDS America Chicago is literally down the street from Steppenwolf at the Alphawood Gallery. Finley says the confluence of events gives audiences an opportunity to reflect on many responses, both visual and theatrical, to AIDS when it was at its height at striking the gay community.
"I take on a first person approach, but still there's that distance," Finley said. "I hope when audiences hear the texts, that it will be meaningful."
Finley's second Chicago premiere is Unicorn Gratitude Mystery, which was her unflinching look at the gender politics between U.S. presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and liberalism in general. Written during last year's election season, Unicorn Gratitude Mystery was a piece that Finley thought she would be able to put behind her. Trump's unexpected presidential win puts Finley in the unfortunate position of getting more mileage out of it.
"One thing we should be talking about is why now? How does theater and performance be affective as a space of resistance?" Finley asked. "Theater is not necessarily this place of escape, but a place to have reality. Life is more important than art, but life is meaningless without art to give us direction and be spaces of inspiration."
Finley, of course, will forever be known as one of "The NEA Four," which included John Fleck as well as lesbian and gay performance artists Holly Hughes and Tim Miller. This group of button-pushing performers lost a Supreme Court case ruling on whether their governmental grants from the National Endowment for the Arts could be pulled to due to "indecency" in their material.
So when Donald Trump assumed the presidency and revealed threats to de-fund not only the NEA, but also the National Endowment for the Humanities ( NEH ) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ( CPB ), Finley had to respond.
With a smartly critical op-ed on Trump in TIME magazine, she cited numerous examples of how Trump's personal fortunes both directly and indirectly benefitted from each of the government agencies facing his blunt and erratic chopping block.
Finley's performance legacy and notoriety will also likely be tied to her penchant for smearing foods like chocolate syrup or smashed eggs against her bare torso. Finley deployed this shocking theatrical device as part of her performance pieces where she spoke out against consumerism, gentrification, sexism and other injustices.
During the interview, I mentioned to Finley that a 2016 Free Street Theater performance piece called Space Age ( For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Universe Is Not Enough ) paid homage to her bodily use of food. The show's gay co-authors and performers Ricardo Gamboa and Sean Parris spilled a jar of salsa down the former's front while discussing a spicy sexual encounter.
Finley laughed because she actually saw Space Age in Chicago. In fact, Gamboa is one of Finley's graduate students at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
"There are other artists before me that were using food, so it's a lovely discourse to be in," Finley said. "The body is a beautiful canvas."
Karen Finley performs Written in Sand: Collected AIDS Writings at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb. 10 and 11, while Unicorn Gratitude Mystery is at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb. 17 and 18. Both shows are at the 1700 Theatre of Steppenwolf Theatre, 1700 N. Halsted St. Tickets are $25; call 312-335-1650 or visit Steppenwolf.org .
