Artist, writer, editor and cultural organizer Steven Durland died on March 11 at the age of 75 after a short illness. His longtime collaborator and life partner, Linda Frye Burnham, confirmed his death in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, his home of three decades.
Durland was born in 1951 in Long Beach, California, and grew up in South Dakota. Over the course of his early life, he lived in Massachusetts and New York before returning to the West Coast in the early 1980s. In 1993, he and Burnham moved to Frog Pond Farm in Saxapahaw, where they lived alongside dogs, cats, chickens and geese.
Durland is best known for his work as an editor of High performance magazine, founded by Burnham in 1978, from 1986 to ’94. During its nearly two decades of existence, the publication featured thousands of artists, including Nancy Buchanan, Carolee Schneemann, Paul McCarthy, Suzanne Lacy, and the recently deceased Ulysses Jenkins.
Before his career as an editor, Durland trained as a ceramic artist, earning his BFA from the University of South Dakota and completing an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. During this period he became increasingly involved in performance and mail art practices. A letter he sent from Amherst appeared in the fourth issue of Burnham’s High performance magazine in December 1978, where he praised the quarterly as a service to artists, adding wryly, “especially to people like me who live in areas where performance is about as common as an eloquent abstract expressionist.” The same issue featured his 1978 performance, “Win Defeat/BID FOR POWER,” an absurdist competition fueled by dice rolls and art history trivia. His 1982 performance Death and Taxis, which both he and Burnham documented, appeared in the Summer 1982 issue.
In addition to performance, Durland was closely involved in mail art and independent publications, conducting correspondence via international postal networks and producing small printed works. He started developing in April 1980 Tacita micro-newspaper laid out as a single-sided postcard. Burnham later invited Durland to create Tacit a recurring column High performancestarting with issue #16 in 1981–’82. In the introduction, Burnham commented on his signature combination of humor and satire from the social and art worlds.
Durland first met Burnham in 1981 during a visit to New York. At the time, he was working as a computer typesetter, having learned compugraphics — an early form of digital phototypesetting — while still in Massachusetts. After freelancing in the commercial printing industry in New York, he later applied this technical expertise to editorial publishing. As Burnham recalled in a 2007 interview with curator and historian Jenni Sorkin, “So here I met this handsome young man, incredibly smart and friendly, a performance artist who knew how to set type. [laughs] Take it away!”
In 1983, Durland moved to Los Angeles and soon began working with Burnham High performancebecame editor-in-chief and, in 1986, editor. His first issue as editor articulated a vision of performance art as a “generalist” practice—one rooted in interdisciplinarity, cross-reference research, and expansion beyond specialization.
During his tenure, Durland guided the magazine through the culture wars of the time, while consistently opposing an isolationist view of artistic practice. High performance expanded to a broader engagement with community-oriented and socially engaged art, while maintaining a commitment to documentation and experimentation. He described the magazine as ‘a journalistic home for new, unrecognized and innovative work in the arts’, and championed the importance of multiple contexts in which art could thrive. He also initiated a series of thematic issues including ¡Nuevo Latino!featuring the paper fashions of Chicana artist Diane Gamboa, photographed by Daniel Joseph Martinez on the cover, and Latino art communities in Los Angeles and internationally at the forefront. By time High performance Published after its 76th edition in 1997, it had become an indispensable record of ephemeral practices that would otherwise have disappeared from history.
The impulse that gave shape High performance also transferred his values from the printed page to lived, spatial practice. In Santa Monica, feminist art studios became the 18th Street Arts Center through the efforts of Burnham, Durland, and Susanna Bixby Dakin. Shortly thereafter, Burnham and performance artist Tim Miller co-founded Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, a hub for collaboration amid the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 1995, Durland and Burnham co-founded the community-based art nonprofit Art in the Public Interest, which took its name from a 1993 book by art historian Arlene Raven. The duo also edited The Citizen Artist: 20 years of art in the public arena (1998), in which they thanked the artists without whom “our work would not be what it is.”
Throughout his life, Durland was committed to art as a civic practice. In the mid-1970s, he worked as a community artist in Madison, South Dakota, for a year through the South Dakota Arts Council’s Artist in the Schools program and funded by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. Speaking to me in 2019, he called it “the best job I’ve ever had.” From a former jewelry store on Main Street, he produced work, taught and engaged the public as the city’s unofficial artist.
At Frog Pond Farm, Durland developed a body of work rooted in the local environment, collecting bark, leaves, eggs from their chickens, beeswax and other natural materials to create assemblages that combine organic material with digital processes, often enlarging elements to monumental scale. In 2015, he and Burnham created ‘Woodland Banners Poetry Walk’, a permanent outdoor installation that combined printed banners with the latter’s poems derived from artist quotes. Durland also had Bourbon, Dogs & Art, a yurt studio and gallery on site where much of this work was exhibited.
Highways Performance Space was installed in January inflation meter, a solo exhibition of Durland’s work. This coincided with the launch of High Performance: A Two-Year Conference (2025-2027)a collaboration between Highways, 18th Street Arts Center, the Performance Art Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and the Getty Research Institute. The initiative includes a range of programs, including monthly virtual and in-person reading groups.
In the press text for Inflation meterhe remembered the words of Marina Abramović and Ulay, whom he interviewed in 1986 for High performance. They described the artist’s life as unfolding in phases: warrior, priest, lover, and finally gardener. Durland saw both himself and Burnham as inhabiting this final phase, one dedicated to cultivation, care, and continuity.
When asked by Sorkin if he saw himself as a tastemaker, Durland replied that he was more of a “facilitator.”
“There are things we can do that no one else could do,” he said, describing the arts as infrastructure. “And when we did that, the whole system benefited.” That steadfast, community-oriented ethos defined his life and work. He is survived by Linda Frye Burnham; their dogs, Gracie and Oliver; his siblings, Nancy Tregaskes, Lori Manske, Patty Bassett and Tom Durland; and his stepchildren, Jill, Tony and Andy Burnham.
