Johanna Went

May 30

Biography

Johanna Went (b. 1949, Buffalo, NY) is an autodidact artist known for performances with exploding transformations of characters, sound, images, improvised music, and ritual. Went has worked closely with long-time collaborator and musical director Mark Wheaton for 40 years. Wheaton and Went produced the album Hyena for Catasonic Records and Club Year a compilation of their performance videos. In 1985 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship Grant. Went has performed at venues including Hong Kong Cafe, Beyond Baroque, The Whiskey, Club Lingerie, the Music Machine, and On Klub, as well as art spaces in the U.S. and Europe, most notably LACE (Los Angeles), COCA (Seattle), The Shaffey Theater (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Alice Tulley Hall, Lincoln Center (New York), Franklin Furnace (New York) and at the Perfo Time Festival (Rotterdam, Holland). Recent exhibitions and performances venues include Ablutions of a Nefarious Nature at Track 16 Gallery (2007); Un-figuring the Body at University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach (2008); Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. at MOCA (2017). Her work has been reviewed in X–TRA, Paper, Slash, Los Angeles Times, Artforum and High Performance, among other publications.