Joan Hotchkis: Tearsheets: Letters I Didn’t Send Home

Los Angeles performance artist Joan Hotchkis presented a solo performance piece that follows an L.A. cattle-ranching heiress who returns to her family’s ranch, which has become a tourist trap as she is slowly inhabited by the ghosts of the people and animals that had previously lived there. Based on authentic documents and interviews, Hotchkis exposed the racism and sexism beneath the cowboy myth and tore the mask off upper-class mores to reveal similarities between the raising of cattle and the raising of women.