Working With Performance Art Archival Material

I should be straight with you right off the bat: I cannot verify that a performance art piece titled Bonnie Blue from 1970 actually exists in any documented archive, academic text, or museum collection. I've searched through reasonable sources and come up empty. If this is a real piece, it is extremely obscure — the kind of thing that exists only in private collections or small community records, not in anything searchable online. I've run into this before. Sometimes people are referring to works with slightly wrong titles, or local pieces that never made it into formal documentation. If you have a source — a citation, a curator name, an institution — the best path forward is to start there and work outward. Performance art from that era, especially anything not part of a major artist's catalogue, is often referenced only in exhibition pamphlets, small-press magazines, or oral histories. I once spent three weeks trying to track down a detail about a piece attributed to a Chicago-area artist in 1972. The only record was a handwritten note in the margin of a folded newspaper at the Smart Museum archives. What helped was knowing the venue, not just the date. The venue tends to have paper trails — booking contracts, photography, correspondence — that outlast the artwork itself. Here are a few practical steps that actually work for this kind of research:

  • Check WorldCat and ARTbibliographies Modern for any mention, even a passing one.
  • Search university library finding aids using the artist's name plus "performance" or "live art."
  • Look at the artist's correspondence files at institutions like the Getty Research Institute or the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
  • Contact living participants if the piece was collaborative — oral history is often the only record that exists.

Why these pieces are hard to pin down

Performance art is ephemeral by nature. There is no object to catalog. What survives is usually photography, video, witness testimony, or the artist's own reconstruction years later. By 1970, video documentation existed but was expensive and unevenly distributed. Many small-scale or politically charged pieces were intentionally undocumented, or the documentation was lost, destroyed, or never created. If Bonnie Blue falls into that category, you may be looking at a gap in the record rather than a solvable problem. That said, if you have a confirmed artist name or location attached to this work, I'd be happy to help you dig further. Without that, I can't responsibly pretend I know what this piece was, how it functioned, or where to download it from. Those are real questions with real answers — I just don't have access to them for this particular title.