performance art

American  

noun

1. a collaborative art form originating in the 1970s as a fusion of several artistic media, as painting, film, video, music, drama, and dance, and deriving in part from the 1960s performance happenings.

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performance art British  

noun

1. a theatrical presentation that incorporates various art forms, such as dance, sculpture, music, etc

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Other Word Forms

• performance artist noun

Etymology

Origin of performance art

First recorded in 1970–75

Example Sentences

All land art is performance art to some extent, and Michael Heizer spent more than 50 years shaping “City.”

From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 15, 2026

Across the tent, in a display of performance art, Amanda Ross-Ho continuously pushes a giant, inflatable Earth around a soccer field, symbolic of “the labor it takes to just keep things going all the time.”

From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 27, 2026

"There's a lot going on with that little inflatable frog," says LM Bogad, a professor at University of California, Davis and a Guggenheim Fellow who specialises in performance art.

From BBC • Dec. 27, 2025

The exhibition displays over 200 different works drawn from the multiple disciplines Ono has engaged with across almost seven decades, whether film, music, conceptual or performance art, and also includes her continuing peace activism.

From Salon • Nov. 25, 2025

“No one ever understands performance art when it’s on the cutting edge.”

From "Landscape with Invisible Hand" by M.T. Anderson