Richard Newton

Richard Newton (b. 1948, Oakland) is a performance artist and filmmaker whose work — inflected with surrealism, poignancy, and dark humor — helped define the raw downtown edge of LA performance. He earned his MFA at UC Irvine (1973) among a storied cohort that included Chris Burden, Barbara T. Smith, and Nancy Buchanan, and began making art from the cast-offs of American abundance: Beggar's Banquet (1972), two lavish pyramids built from one night's dumpster harvest of discarded produce, was later included in the Getty's Pacific Standard Time. His provocative 1970s performances as "The Former Miss Barstow" — including Touch a Penis with the Former Miss Barstow at LAICA in 1977 — tested the era's boundaries of gender and taste, while later site-specific works placed audiences at a chained hotel-room door on Skid Row for meditations on alcoholism, family, and nuclear dread (Get Under the Table, Don't Look at the Windows). His one-of-a-kind artists' books were shown at Documenta VI in Kassel; his films won prizes at festivals in Spain and Portugal, and his feature small white house took Best First Feature at Figueira da Foz. One of the downtown "Young Turks" documented in Stephen Seemayer's film of that name, Newton lives in Pasadena and continues to make films, photographs, and installations shown internationally.