American interdisciplinary artist
Martha McDonald (born 1964, Pittsburgh, PA) is an American interdisciplinary artist known for her performances blending music, singing, dance, and storytelling and site-specific installations of handmade costumes and objects. Her work is responsive and research-based utilizing collections, archives, material practices, and cultural narratives to bring historical sites, forms and experiences to life. Themes often include absence, memory, mourning and transformation.
Her work has been presented in museums, historic houses, and galleries internationally, and she has received research opportunities, artist residencies and fellowships. Through a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2023, McDonald studied the Appalachian dulcimer at the National Museum of American History and Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Her 2023 residency at Wharton Esherick Museum, Malvern, PA culminated in the performance The Wood is Singing in Color, which explored lesser known aspects of American artist Wharton EsherickâÂÂs art practice including his poetry and set designs. In Music for Modernist Shapes: Reimagining Spectodrama at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, McDonald created sculptures and costumes drawing from Bauhaus artist Xanti SchawinskyâÂÂs 1936 experimental performance at the college, Spectodrama, using paper folding techniques taught by Josef Albers at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College.
One of her best known works, The Weeping Dress, explored Victorian mourning culture and fashion. In the performance, a crepe paper dress ran color that stained her body, expressing the way loss literally marks us. The work was exhibited at Craft Victoria as part of the 2011 LâÂÂOreal Melbourne Fashion Festival; The Tamworth Textile Triennial, which toured Australia; and later at the Zuckerman Museum of ArtâÂÂs exhibition This Mortal Coil (2021).
McDonaldâÂÂs performances are described as fusions of âÂÂlecture, monologue, recital and gesture,â noting her ability to traverse âÂÂthe borders of fact and fictionâ while blending craft, history, and performance. In McDonaldâÂÂs interdisciplinary performances, song serves as both narrative structure and emotional catalyst. Trained as a classical singer, she draws on diverse musical traditions such as Baroque opera, Appalachian folk, and contemporary experimental music to create emotionally charged performances.
McDonald was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. She studied piano, received classical vocal training and later earned a bachelorâÂÂs degree in English from Pennsylvania State University, where she was introduced to Baroque music by a professor. Alex Baker, her husband and renowned contemporary art curator, shares her musical interests; BakerâÂÂs father was an opera singer and mother was a musicologist/harpsichordist.
After completing her degree, McDonald worked as a freelance journalist, a museum docent, and a fundraiser with the Maternity Care Coalition. In the 1990s, she co-founded Belladonna, a music ensemble performing 17th- and 18th-century bawdy songs and ballads, often reframed through a feminist lens. Around the same period, she performed with the Big Mess Cabaret, a Philadelphia-based collective of experimental theater artists. Early work featured monologues she wrote based on research into mythological characters and Baroque opera heroines. She received regional press and recognition for many of them including: Diva Trouble: The Death of Dido and Other Diversions (2000), Girls on the Rocks: A MermaidâÂÂs Tale (2001), and Madwomen Unplugged (1999).
In the early 2000s, McDonald was commissioned to respond to the collection of rare books, 18th century furniture and decorative arts at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. In Petals From the Same Flower, her first site-specific piece, McDonald guided the audience through the museum, focusing on objects that were pretending to be something else, Chinoiserie mirrors, Empire furniture, and Shakespeare forgeries, while clothed in an 18th-century dress made in contemporary patterned fabrics. The work explored themes of authenticity and artifice and transitioned her work off the stage and into specific sites.
Lament, a 2006 performance presented as part of Soft Sites through the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, strengthened her new format outside the theater space. McDonald performed outdoors at BartramâÂÂs Garden in collaboration with artist Katie Holten. Focusing on the extinction of plants and John BartramâÂÂs 18th century botanical garden, McDonald led participants through segments of BartramâÂÂs Garden and performed a vocal lament at the riverâÂÂs edge before departing in a canoe.
In 2008, McDonald relocated to Melbourne, Australia with her husband, Alex Baker, who had joined the curatorial team at National Gallery of Victoria as Senior Curator, Contemporary Art. While in Australia, McDonald pursued a Master of Fine Art at Monash University, and her work shifted to focus on the creation of handmade objects, costumes and material explorations. Addressing her dislocation from her home in the United States, she studied Victorian mourning culture and reconnected with Appalachian folk music. Memory and longing are often themes of McDonaldâÂÂs performances, and she continues to explore unique, historical materials and forms through her work.
Since her return to the United States in 2012, McDonald has deepened her research into historical artists, material practices and forms. Her artistic practice integrates research, performance, craft, and collaboration to explore the emotional and historical resonance of sites and their related objects, people and materials. Her projects often begin with in-depth investigations into archives and local histories, focusing on the ways cultural narratives are embodied through material practices.
Many of McDonaldâÂÂs installations and objects are constructed in unconventional materials inspired by her research. Past projects have referenced historical handcrafts connecting her process to womenâÂÂs domestic labor and other overlooked histories of making. Others utilize the resources and material histories of their respective sites. McDonaldâÂÂs performance costumes often serve dual purpose as sculptures activated through dance and movement during the performance.
The Wood is Singing in Color was a live performance at the Wharton Esherick Museum in Malvern, PA. Through archival and material research during her 2023 artist residency, McDonald explored less familiar dimensions of American artist and woodworker Wharton EsherickâÂÂs practice, such as his prismatic theater set design, engagement with Rudolf SteinerâÂÂs anthroposophy and the broader spiritualist movement, and EsherickâÂÂs lyrical writings. McDonald conducted immersive research as well, staying overnight in EsherickâÂÂs farmhouse, Sunekrest, while engaging with his sketches, watercolors, letters, and ephemera.
Drawing on EsherickâÂÂs work, McDonald created songs, costumes, and sculptural props. Collaborating with musicians Brooke Sietinsons and Miriam Goldberg, fashion designer Dana Meyer, and woodworkers Casey Chew and Larissa Huff, McDonald performed in the 1956 workshop Esherick designed with architect Louis Kahn.
The Wharton Esherick Museum has described McDonaldâÂÂs approach as âÂÂresponsive, with aspects of form, design, movement, lyric, and collaboration coming together to produce the final piece,â underscoring her practiceâÂÂs synthesis of research and performance.
Phantom Frequencies was a 2019 site-specific installation and performance McDonald created in collaboration with composer and musician Laura Baird for Emanation 2019 at WheatonArts and Cultural Center in Millville, NJ. Glass objects from WheatonâÂÂs permanent collection were reproduced by the on-site glassmakers and played as musical instruments. In a costume based on a Victorian hoop-skirt, hundreds of glass medicine vials hung from the skirt which McDonald activated and âÂÂplayedâ as an instrument through dance and movement. She and collaborator Laura Baird played other glass instruments such as gongs, bells and horns that became the installation for the ongoing exhibition outside the performances.
The work activated the museumâÂÂs 1970s lobby, designed to simulate a Victorian parlor. Presented as a âÂÂmini-opera,â Phantom Frequencies channeled the spirit of amateur parlor music once performed in domestic interiors, while simultaneously conjuring ethereal acoustics for an imagined future. Joyce Beckenstein writing for the Brooklyn Rail said, âÂÂChanneling musical sound through crystalline, almost invisible forms, set the audience in the moment of fleeting phenomenon, a surround of echoing tonalities evaporating through space and time.âÂÂ
Music for Modernist Shapes: Reimagining Spectodrama was a 2017 performance and installation by McDonald commissioned by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, North Carolina. The project reimagined Bauhaus theatermaker Xanti SchawinskyâÂÂs 1936 experimental theater work Spectodrama: Play, Life, Illusion, which merged performance, light projection, music, and color theory to animate the principles of Bauhaus design. During her residency, McDonald immersed herself in the pedagogical legacies of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. She created a series of paper sculptures and costumes that drew from Josef Albersâ paper-folding techniques used in SchawinskyâÂÂs original performance with students at the college.
The installation was activated through live performance, featuring original music composed by Laura Baird, whose score drew from SchawinskyâÂÂs collaborations with John Evarts, a Black Mountain College music faculty member, as well as from 1930s avant-garde compositions and Appalachian folk traditions.
The work, both âÂÂwhimsical and somber,â reflected on the fragility of art and history amid contemporary political unrest. Writing in Title Magazine, Kaitlin Pomerantz noted that âÂÂusing her great strength as a performer and artist, McDonald makes forgotten objects and overlooked places function fluidly as portals to the pastâÂÂenchanting, complicating, and enriching our awareness of the present.âÂÂ
Themes of memory, longing, absence, and loss are frequent themes of McDonaldâÂÂs interdisciplinary practice. Her performances and installations often draw on historical mourning rituals, particularly those associated with womenâÂÂs domestic and emotional labor.
Since early works like The Garden (1999) and drownâÂÂd in mine own tears (2005), McDonald has explored how grief is expressed, embodied, and transformed through material and song. In The Garden, she explored the deaths of her brother and mother-in-law using a bed filled with garden soil that she attempted to bury herself in. In drownâÂÂd, McDonald performed as Penelope, the wife of Ulysses from The Odyssey. Over the course of the piece, she knitted and unraveled a giant afghan, referencing PenelopeâÂÂs three years of weaving to delay the approach of potential suitors while mourning her husband.
Created during her 2016 residency with RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency) at Revolution Recovery, a construction and demolition recycling center in Philadelphia, Songs of Memory and Forgetting combined song, storytelling and found-object sculpture. Sourcing thousands of photos, articles of clothing, instruments and objects from the piles of trash, McDonald created quilts from the photos and displayed a collection of rescued personal belongings, turning an industrial site of waste and recovery into a meditation on loss and renewal. Her selection of found objects, often from house clean outs after an elderly person died, evoked vanished lives, legacy, loss and mortality. Amid piles of salvaged household items, McDonald performed original and traditional songs with RAIR co-founder Billy Dufala on instruments and constructed sound sculptures pulled from the salvage piles.
The Wall Street Journal and Broad Street Review described the performance as âÂÂquietly riveting,â noting McDonaldâÂÂs ability to transform discarded objects into âÂÂcarriers of memory and mourning.â By foregrounding ephemerality as both theme and process, McDonald invited audiences to reflect not only on what remains after a life has passed, but also on the urgency of how we live in the present.
Hospital Hymn: Elegy for Lost Soldiers was a 2015 performance commissioned through the IDENTIFY series and exhibited at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery to accompany the exhibition Dark Fields of the Republic: Alexander Gardner Photographs, 1859âÂÂ1872. The piece was performed in the museumâÂÂs Great Hall which was used as a hospital during the American Civil War where poet Walt Whitman worked as a nurse. McDonald explored WhitmanâÂÂs writings on unknown soldiers, death and natureâÂÂs role in mourning.
The installation featured a long row of cots draped in white sheets and pillowcases concealing red felt flowers. During the performance, McDonald released the bright red flowers by slicing open the pillowcases, symbolizing both battlefield wounds and the overwhelming grief of survivors. The work explored how personal and collective loss resonate across history, connecting Civil War trauma to contemporary experiences of public grief.
Craig Woodward played fiddle and concertina while McDonald sang traditional hymns mentioned in WhitmanâÂÂs notebooks. Woodward has accompanied McDonald in many projects dating back to her time in Australia: Deep Sea Chanties (2012) aboard HMAS Blackbird, The Weeping Dress (2011) at Craft Victoria and The Further the Distance, the Tighter the Knot (2009) at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts.
The Lost Garden (2014) at The Woodlands in Philadelphia explored impermanence in relation to the history of the location as a botanic garden and greenhouse owned by William Hamilton. The rapid urbanization of the 19th century nearly overtook the garden, but it was saved by transforming the site into a cemetery. Referencing Victorian wax flowers and hair jewelry, McDonald knitted replicas of plants to memorialize the lost plants from HamiltonâÂÂs garden. Edith Newhall of The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that the work âÂÂtransformed loss into material presence.âÂÂ
Deep Sea Chanties was a 2012 performance, installation and journey on HMAS Blackbird from Melbourne, Australia to The Substation exhibition space in Newport. On HMAS Blackbird, McDonald performed 19th-century sea shanties alongside musician Craig Woodward, exploring how sailors sang to cope with homesickness and fear during long sea voyages. After disembarking, attendees entered The Substation, a former electrical substation for the railway system, where McDonaldâÂÂs installation displayed nautical knots and a vintage phonograph playing her rendition of The Grey Funnel Line. A 7-inch record of the song was distributed to participants as a memento. The performance explored the emotions of sailors separated from home, mirroring McDonaldâÂÂs own return to the U.S. after years in Australia, and honored her late father-in-lawâÂÂs service in the merchant marines and affinity for singing aboard ship. The work was commissioned by The Substation for the Stories from the city, stories from the sea exhibition, with a 7-inch vinyl record edition commissioned by Satellite Art Projects.
The 2011 performance and installation The Weeping Dress explored grief and loss through costume, song and material transformation referencing the mourning rituals of Victorian women. McDonald wore a black Victorian-style dress made from crepe paper to reference 19th-century mourning fashions that were dyed with fugitive, plant-based dyes. During a 20-minute performance, McDonald sang as water dripped from the ceiling above. As the water saturated the costume, the dyes bled across McDonaldâÂÂs body and wept a reflective black ink puddle across the wooden stage. After the performance the empty mourning dress remained in its stained surroundings, as an artifact of the emotional release. The dye stained McDonaldâÂÂs skin leaving a physical trace of the mourning experience. The piece has been exhibited internationally, including at Craft Victoria as part of the 2011 LâÂÂOreal Melbourne Fashion Festival; The Tamworth Textile Triennial, which toured Australia; and later at the Zuckerman Museum of ArtâÂÂs exhibition This Mortal Coil (2021).
Critics described the piece as a âÂÂhaunting" meditation on grief and an evocative metaphor for how loss physically and emotionally marks the body.
Writing in Art Monthly Australia, Stella Gray, said: âÂÂWhereas earlier pieces responded to the resonances of their respective sitesâÂÂâÂÂactivating' them in McDonaldâÂÂs wordsâÂÂin The Weeping Dress, the dress became the site; an emotional crucible "activated" and ultimately transformed not by fire but instead by water. The platform on which she stood was also transformed by water as it activated the dress; the wet dye acted like a glossy varnish, turning the matte wooden surface into a reflective pool, like the mirrors that Victorian mourners had to keep covered.âÂÂ
Crying Portraits (2010) in the On Life After Death exhibition at the gallery Death Be Kind featured photos of McDonald in tears wearing the crepe paper mourning dress, The Weeping Dress. Her neck and body were stained by the crepe paper running color, symbolizing the mark of loss and absence of a loved one. An empty wood box contained a recording of McDonald humming an American folk song. Viewers were invited to open the box to hear the song and feel the vibration of McDonaldâÂÂs voice.
The Further the Distance, the Tighter the Knot (2009) was presented at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, a repurposed Victorian family home in Melbourne, Australia. Conceived during McDonaldâÂÂs relocation from Philadelphia to Australia, the performance and installation explored themes of longing, displacement, and absence. The installation was composed of hand-knit memento mori, inspired by 19th-century handcrafts that were historically made from human hair to memorialize lost loved ones.
Critic and curator Jeff Khan, then Artistic Director of MelbourneâÂÂs Next Wave Festival, wrote in the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts Catalogue (2009) that The Further the Distance, the Tighter the Knot âÂÂunravels the currents of migration, memory, and home that pulse and jostle through both personal experience and our wider cultural imaginary. McDonaldâÂÂs performance mobilizes a number of artforms from across Western cultural history to probe the nature of displacement, yearning for home, and the contingent notion of home itself in our restless present moment.âÂÂ
Martha McDonaldâÂÂs work has been widely recognized for its emotional depth and sensitivity to site and material. Critics have praised her ability to intertwine performance, costume, music, and installation into deeply affecting meditations on memory, loss, and transformation.
Writing in The Age, critic Janice Breen Burns described The Weeping Dress as âÂÂone of the most evocative metaphors for the power of fashion that I may possibly ever see; a performance and installation about clothing as communicator, and how it marks the body just as the body marks and defines clothingâÂÂ. Similarly, in Weighted with Sorrow at Zuckerman Museum of Art (2021), art historian Jenni Sorkin situates McDonald within the lineage of feminist performance art, noting that her work embodies âÂÂdevotion, sadness, and longing,â and offers âÂÂa tactile vocabulary for mourning that bridges the personal and the historical.âÂÂ
McDonaldâÂÂs site-specific practice has also drawn acclaim for its integration of sound and environment. Writing for The Brooklyn Rail, Joyce Beckenstein observed that in Emanation 2019, McDonald âÂÂchanneled musical sound through crystalline, almost invisible forms, setting the audience in the moment of fleeting phenomenonâÂÂa surround of echoing tonalities evaporating through space and time.â Her 2018 project Music for Modernist Shapes was similarly praised by Kaitlin Pomerantz in Title Magazine for âÂÂsinging in dark times,â highlighting McDonaldâÂÂs ability to âÂÂtranslate modernist abstraction into the language of song and gestureâÂÂinfusing geometric form with human resonance.âÂÂ
Across her career, McDonaldâÂÂs interdisciplinary practice has resonated for its sensitivity to place, historical memory, and emotional truthâÂÂwhat The Age once called âÂÂa quiet, devastating beauty that lingers long after the performance ends.âÂÂ
McDonaldâÂÂs achievements have been recognized through numerous fellowships, residencies, and awards, including a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2023), Artist-in-Residence at the Wharton Esherick Museum (2023), and Performing Arts Residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (2018). She has also been awarded residencies and fellowships at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (2017), Pew Center Performance Artist Resident at RAIR (2016), Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (2015), Artist-in-Residence at Evergreen Museum & Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD (2007) and MacDowell (2003). Additional honors include the Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant (2014), Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in New Performance Forms (2006), and the Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Performing Arts (2004).
Her work is represented in several public collections, including the Museum of American Glass (Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, NJ), Tamworth Regional Gallery (Australia), the State Library Victoria (Melbourne), Monash University Library Artist Book Collection, and the Victorian College of the Arts Library.