Marilyn Arsem,
The Color of Power (Sleeping in Honey), at the Asiatopia 10th Performance Art Festival in Bangkok, 2008.
Photo: Peter Baren, via ​veniceperformanceart.org.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has named Marilyn Arsem as the winner of the 2015 Maud Morgan Prize. This is the first time the prize has been awarded to a performance artist, reports Artforum.

A Boston-based performance artist, Arsem founded Mobius, an interdisciplinary collective of artists in the mid-1970s. She went on to become head of the performance art department at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where she had been a faculty member for 27 years.

The artist has played a significant role in establishing performance art as a serious art form. In the 1960s she participated in “happenings.” In the 1970s she participated in many festivals and has subsequently performed in a variety of cities all over the world.

Often she explores notions of death and the afterlife, women’s work, and war.

She focuses on site-specific works, engaging with the history and politics of the country, and ultimately the materiality of each site. Past performance sites have included a former Cold War missile base in the US, a 15th-century Turkish bath in Macedonia, an Argentine aluminum factory, and the location where the Spanish landed in the Philippines.

Arsem will receive a $10,000 cash prize and will create new performances for a special Morgan Prize solo exhibition, which is planned for late 2015 at the Museum of Fine Arts.

[Featured image: Arsem performing “One Day” at a former Trappist monastery in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, July 15, 2002. Image courtesy of marilynarsem.net.]