Erasing Odysseus

Hi, my name is Penelope Alice Boyer, but Penny is fine…

2020 onward, my time has been devoted to the writing of a book-length piece of feminist neo-mythic fiction/auto-fiction, Erasing Odysseus.

In 2019, eleven archive boxes representing my work with the National Association of Artists’ Organizations in the early 1990s, along with documentation of my itinerant performance career in Lower Manhattan and elsewhere in the ‘eighties, were acquired by the Fales Library of New York University for their Downtown Collection.

Since 2017, I have been project/art director for the world’s first Land Art Generator Solar Mural Artworks collaborating with EPIcenter, the Esperanza Center, Local Initiatives Support Corporation | LISC-San Antonio and the Seattle-based Land Art Generator Initiative, global leaders in the movement to make renewable energy beautiful.  

In 2017, 2012, 2007, 1995, and 1994, I queerated or co-queerated (term of my own coinage) exhibitions of LGBTQI+ expression at the Esperanza Center.

In 2012, my book–My Great High-Roofed House: Homer’s Penelope–was published by Atropos Press (Dresden & New York).

From 2001-2017, I worked intensively with Land Heritage Institute (LHI) on San Antonio’s far southside—as an Executive Committee member of the Board for the first decade and as a paid volunteer for the following several years. I conceived, curated, designed and implemented: Museo Paseo, a series of trail-accessed public art installations; annual Second Saturday Speaker Series: One Land/Many Hands, Explorations in Ethnobotany, Naturalist Practices: Healing, Health, Juego y Yerma; and the bi-annual LHI Art-Sci Symposia with national speakers including Joan Jonas (artist, MIT), Lucy Lippard (writer, curator), Sandy Stone (ACT-LAB, University of Texas @ Austin), among others.

Since 1993, I have lived in the Lavaca Neighborhood of San Antonio performing roles I never thought I would play:  Executive Director of the San Antonio Dance Umbrella; President of the Lavaca Neighborhood Association; Charter Member of the Mission Trail Rotary Club; Board Member of the San Antonio Chapter of the ACLU, Community Housing Resources (CHR), Green Spaces Alliance, the Neighborhood Resource Center, San Antonio Master Naturalists, Solar San Antonio, Southtown Mainstreet Alliance, the South San Antonio Chamber of Commerce and on committees of the San Antonio River Authority—among other entities. I also performed in plays at Austin’s Salvage Vanguard Theatre and San Antonio’s San Pedro Playhouse, and in a stage play and radio play written for me–at The Club @ La Mama ETC in NYC and on NPR’s This American Life, respectively–by acclaimed author David Sedaris.  I am also, I believe, the only person who has portrayed Mrs. McNay at the McNay Art Museum–in a presentation by the late artist Henry Rayburn.

From 1982 to 1992 or thereabouts, I acted as an artist/administrator working days at arts service organizations (Theatre Communications Group, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Association of Artists’ Organizations) while performing at night or on leave in works by Anne Bogart, Ping Chong, Ain Gordon, Tim Miller, Stephen Petronio among others, at venues including BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music)’s Next Wave Festival, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Creative Time’s Art on the Beach, Dance Theatre Workshop, the Danspace Project and Poetry Project Performance Series at St. Mark’s Church, The Dance Place (Washington, DC), P.S. 1, Performance Space 122, Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Spirit Square (Charlotte, NC), Spoleto/USA (Charleston, SC).

For more details, please see www.penelopeboyer.com.