Tony Labat

A Cuban-born, San Francisco-based artist working across performance, video, sculpture and installation, Labat has spent his career probing media, criminality, and the body politic. He emerged from the politically charged California performance scene of the 1970s — alongside figures like Chris Burden, Suzanne Lacy, and ASCO — that pushed art out of the gallery and into public life. His 1978 collaboration with Mike Osterhout, 'Kidnap Attempt', staged the attempted abduction of a public official as political performance, deliberately collapsing the boundary between an artwork and a real crime.