“Linda J. Albertano skeins surrealism and lyricism into eight pieces. The warped reality of David Lynch is an apt reference point, for Albertano’s university degree is in film making: vivid images splash colour into her tales. Lush language and carefully chosen aural bites cultivate texture in a world seeping with heat and saturated with history, a world unburdened by chronology.
“Sexual and political power relations form Albertano’s stomping ground. With satire and simile as her tools, she unravels scenarios, attempting to uncover their subtexts… A commentary that entertains and educates as it inquires.”
~ Juile Taraska, The Wire (UK)
“A genuine avant-garde cafe style… a riveting performance of monologues.”
~ Harol Norse, Poetry Flash
“Albertano is a musician, a storyteller, a displayer of props, a comically generated presence, a model of complex speaking methods, a performance artist whose work has been presented in Europe as well as America.”
~ Benjamin Weissman, Beyond Baroque
From Poetry Flash magazine, December 2024 – Lead article on front page:
Tower of Power: The Life of Linda J. Albertano
by Suzanne Lummis
SHE WAS LOS ANGELES’S veteran multi-disciplinary performance artist of the city’s Second Wave (who’d found her calling when she studied with Rachel Rosenthal, a leading figure in Los Angeles’s performance art movement’s First Wave, in the ’70s). She was a vocalist, musician and poet, or writer of poem-like things, speaker of witty, surrealist monologues and—together with her instructor, Kora master Prince Diabate—player of that difficult, many-stringed African instrument traditionally forbidden to women. People knew her famous height, 6′ 4″, but never her age. When asked, Linda Albertano always claimed she was 27 but had lived fast and hard [some say she was born in 1942; some say 1952]. The part about living was true. Wow, did she live, from Venice, California (her apartment complex stood just one block and one Pacific Coast Highway from the sand) to Vietnam, to Amsterdam, to Western Guinea. She performed in all these places, and more. She was Los Angeles’s and she was the world’s.
Linda Albertano kept packing in experience and delivering experiences to others until age (cough, cough), September 13, 2022. Frank Lutz, her partner of fifty-five years—then, in the last days of her life, husband—has this fall endowed Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice a fellowship in her name, an endowment to enable women to study, tuition free, poetry writing with an accent on the art of performance, The Linda J. Albertano Fellowship for Women Poets.
What is the most interesting set of facts about the late, but recent, multi-disciplinary performance artist Linda J. Albertano? Is it…
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A Dada Tribute to Linda J. Albertano, for you to have some fun, Dear Visitor !
Linda J. Albertano was – still is – a prominent figure in what is known as Dada art, that we in America inherited from Europe During World War 1. She loved the wackiness of Dada, and the artists in it.