Buchanan who studied art at U.C. Irvine participated in the exhibition New Art from Orange County co-sponsored by the UC Irvine Studio Art Department and the Newport Harbor Art Museum in 1972.  In her performance Hair Transplant,  at the F Space, an alternative space run by  UC Irvine students, Bucahnan symbolically switched genders with Robert Walker a male performer by exchanging body hair.

Lynn Hershman Leeson works in photography, video, installation, interactive and net-based media.  Secret Agents Private I, The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson a touring retrospective of her work was organized by the Henry Gallery in Seattle in 2005.  Her artwork is held in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art New York; The National Gallery of Canada; LA County Museum of Art; Seattle Museum; DG Bank, Frankfurt; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The William Lehmbruch Museum, Duisburg; ZKM Center for Art and Media in Germany, The University Art Museum of Berkeley, and the Hess Collection.

Lynn Hershman and Eleanor Coppola had the idea to transform two rooms in a transient hotel in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Their room installations at the Dante Hotel opened to visitors on Halloween night, 1973. In her room, Hershman placed two life-size wax cast figures (the heads were modeled from her own), one black and one white, under rumpled bed sheets. She surrounded them with their belongings: underwear spilling out of a bureau, cosmetics, hair rollers, cigarette butts, magazines and books, and a murky fish bowl. A radio played the local news, and lipstick-scrawled phrases covered the bureau mirror. Hershman’s twenty-four-hour-a-day, nine-month-long installation ended when a visitor at 3 a.m. mistook the wax figures for corpses and called the police, who came and took all the room elements back to the station. Hershman intended for her installation to be open-ended, with no fixed last day, and was prepared to incorporate changes to the work that might occur over time. The Dante Hotel led directly to Hershman’s extended performance, Roberta Breitmore, in which she assumed a fictional identity over a period of several years.

Paul Kos

Beggs, a professional sound engineer, to establish credibility An absurdist proposition that can be understood in Buddhist terms, Kos’s installation premiered in Sound Sculpture As at the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in San Francisco, one of the first sound exhibitions anywhere. Kos shared with Arte Povera artists—working at the same time in Italy—an interest in process-oriented sculptural works made up of unconventional, often organic, materials. He observed that many of his peers in Northern California, including Terry Fox, “liked to use objects and materials for their indigenous characteristics . . . the use of ice as a temporary object or gravity and sand falling.” This more personal and local approach was in contrast to that of artists on the East Coast, “who, more aware of what was timely, directed their works toward the art world.”

Lowell Darling is a conceptual artist whose work of the past forty years has included performance, video, correspondence art, and numerous public interventions including two statewide campaign for Governor in California in 1978 and 2010.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the increased professionalization of art education was a ripe target for critique. In this atmosphere, Lowell Darling established the mail order Fat City School of Finds Art out of his Hollywood apartment.Anyone could request a master’s degree, and Darling obliged. He often traveled to the Bay Area to conduct graduation ceremonies, handing out both masters’ and “Doctors of Dada” degrees to one and all. To date, he has granted more than 50,000 degrees.

Martha Rosler is an influential video, installation and performance artist whose works primarily with images and texts. Most of her work concerns social or political  issues, and she began to make significant work with political content while still attending the university of California at San Diego. In the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967–72), first published in an alternative newspaper,  Rosler vented her frustration at the reporting done on the Vietnam War. She pasted war images from “Life” and other magazines onto pictures of interiors from “House Beautiful” or, conversely, U.S. scenes onto pictures of Vietnam. By juxtaxoposing horrific photographs of the war with stylish home interiors from architectural and design magazines, she simultaneously critiques American militarism and domestic complacency.

Stephen Laub, who had been a student of Jim Melchert at UC Berkeley, used his body in a unique series of performances that involved aligning himself with a life-size, projected photographic image from his family’s album. Laub literally steps into the shoes—male and female—of relatives and friends, many of whom he never knew because his family fled Berlin at the beginning of World War II with not much more than their photo albums. Merging his identity with those of others, Laub’s slide-projection performances are a project about both personal identity and social history.

Linda Mary Montano is a seminal figure in contemporary feminist performance art and her work since the mid 1960s has been critical in the development of video by, for, and about women. Attempting to dissolve the boundaries between art and life, Montano continues to actively explore her art/life through shared experience, role adoption, and life altering ceremonies,. Her artwork is starkly autobiographical and often concerned with personal and spiritual transformation.

Chicken Dance: The Streets of San Francisco was performed in 1972 in nine public spaces throughout the city, including museums, galleries, and iconic sights such as the Golden Gate Bridge and the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. Wearing a blue prom dress, tap shoes, and an elaborate chicken-feather headdress Montano traipsed around the city, and pulling a small wagon with a cassette player, often dancing spontaneously. She had adopted the chicken as her personal totem before she arrived in San Francisco because, in their display of extreme concentration (their focus is gathering food) and in their nonfunctional wings, chickens reminded her of a Zen parable. Montano sought personal transformation through her performances that continue today.

Barbara T. Smith is one of the pioneers of performance and body art. While attending graduate school at UC Irvine Smith began to do durational performances in which she used her own body,  foregrounding her corporeal and gendered experience. In her iconic performance Feed Me(1973), a nude Smith occupied a room in the gallery, and a recording of her voice repeated the phrase “Feed me.”  Boldly beckoning a personal exchange, the work invited viewers to literally feed her or to “feed” her psychologically, or even sexually, placed herself in a vulnerable situation. Smith says that she felt empowered by controlling what would happen in this transformative, feminist performance.Smith’s large-scale project Field Piece (1968–72) was an interactive installation of nine-foot-tall multicolored resin “blades” of grass that would light up when triggered by viewers’ feet, thus illuminating the field (see fig. 2.1, p. 000). When the work was originally presented, the artist asked the audience to remove their clothes, so most of the original spectators experienced Field Piece in the nude as an intimate, sensory, tactile environment.