Spencer Livingston in "A Separate Madness" |  |
Biography
Spencer Livingston's career as an artist began at age seven when he started doing political cartoons for the monthly newsletter of the United Mine Workers of America District 50. Coming from a large family of coal miners and union orgnizers, he grew up moving around the country as his father traveled from one organizing campaign to another. His first acting experience in community theatre also came at age seven.
At age fourteen he was supporting himself with a magic act on the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey, and doing commissioned abstract paintings on the sides of tourists' luggage. He also began playing music at this time (see music page for more)and eventually left school at sixteen to work for five years in a textile mill in upstate New York, studying art and playing in blues bars at night.
In the early 1970s he directed three different performance groups: The Mummers, a street theatre ensemble; Heatray, a multimedia Dadaist troupe, and the Labor Theatre Workshop, a political propaganda group that performed at union-sponsored events and actions. He was a founding member of the Workspace group, the upstate New York arts collective that ran a nonprofit gallery and performance space in Albany for a number of years. During this time he exhibited and performed regularly, working in printmaking, sculpture, film, photography, dance, theatre, and music. He also played nightclubs as a solo act and with a number of bands: Nighthawk, AKA, The Ravers, The Spooge Kings, Crawlin' Kingsnake, and others.
During the Workspace years Livingston was especially known for his performance art, often physically and emotionally violent, demanding of both audience and performers, and featuring his trademark Mauser rifle, his penchant for eating original Dali prints, and his core of diehard collaborators who contributed to his work without questions.
In 1978 Livingston relocated to New Orleans, where he still lives today. In 1979 he, along with artist/writer Bunny Matthews, formed the notorious Dada R&B band Ballistics, which performed for a number of years through constant personnel changes, always centered on Livingston's songwriting, singing, and guitar and saxophone explorations. Ballistics issued a few now-rare recordings before its core members decided to stop performing.
After a number of years of withdrawal from the public art scene, primarily spent writing, Livingston shifted his focus to oil painting, which continues to be his central preoccupation today.
In early 2001, he began a four-year collaboration with artist/musician/actress Robyn Menzel. Together they ran SPACE Gallery, presenting exhibitions of contemporary artists along with film, poetry, dance and music performances. They formed Quiet Blade Productions and began producing films together, set up a painting studio in which they worked together, and began performing in New Orleans' music venues with a band they formed called Spencer Livingston and the Little Sisters of the Protecting Veil.
In the summer of 2004 Livingston and Menzel closed SPACE, dissolved Quiet Blade, broke up the Little Sisters, and indefinitely ceased all collaboration after a bitter dispute over who most deserved the title of The Fifth Beatle (Menzel insisted that either Stu Sutcliffe or Yoko Ono owned the title, while Livingston argued that it had to be either George Martin or Spencer Livingston).
Livingston and his wife Linda live in the Hollygrove section of New Orleans, in a house that they rebuilt together after the storm, along with his ferocious dog Binky, polite dog Bonnie, and cat Emily. He devotes his time to painting, growing flowers, writing, and waiting for his children Jade, Jet, Taylor, and Ella to take over the burden of making art so that he can retire.