(HUDSON, N.Y.) – Pioneering performance artist John Kelly will be in residence at Hudson Opera House over Memorial Day Weekend for a creative doubleheader: the opening of his exhibition, Muse Ascending a Staircase, a multi-media work paying homage to Marcel Duchamp’s scandalous Nude Descending a Staircase, and two performances of The Caravaggio Songs: Music from The Escape Artist. The exhibition opens on Saturday, May 24, 2014, from 5 to 7pm, followed immediately by The Caravaggio Songs at 7pm. A second performance of Caravaggio is on Sunday, May 25, also at 7pm.

Kelly, who recently served as Visiting Artist in Residence at Bard College, emerged from the 1980s club scene in New York,? and is? best-known for his music-theater works based on personas ranging from Barbette and Jean Cocteau to Joni Mitchel and the Mona Lisa. Less known is his work as a visual artist, which often informs his work on stage.

Originally trained as a dancer with American Ballet Theatre, the Harkness House for Ballet Arts, and Charles Weidman, Kelly also studied painting and drawing with Larry Rivers and Barbara Pearlman at Parsons School of Design, and traditional painting techniques with Hannah Barrett at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts School. He trained in Decroux corporeal mime at the Theatre d’lAnge Fou in Paris, trapeze and tite-wire with the Pickle Family Circus in San Francisco, and voice with Peter Elkus at the Academia Musicale Ottorino Respighi in Assisi, Italy.

Kelly’s relationship to the mirror began in the dance studio, and evolved to the making of self-portraits: drawing, painting, photography and video.

Kelly’s performances have been based on subjects ranging from autobiography, to cultural and political phenomenon such as the Berlin Wall, the Troubadours, the AIDS epidemic, and Expressionistic Film. He has created character studies based on historic figures such as Egon Schiele, Caravaggio, Antonin Artaud, Joni Mitchell, and Jean Cocteau.

Kelly’s visual art exhibitions include MOMA, Alexander Gray Associates; The New Museum for Contemporary Art; PS 1; MIT List Visual Art Center; Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Art In General; Momenta Arts; The Kitchen; The American Academy in Rome; FotoGrafia-Festival Internazionale di Roma; MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma; Biagiotti Progetto Arte; the Saratoga Art Museum; and Harvard University. Residencies include Yaddo; The MacDowell Colony; The Civitella Ranieri Center; The Sundance Institute Theatre Program; and the P.S.1 National Studio Artist Program.

As a vocalist, Kelly performed John Cage with the San Francisco Symphony; collaborated (as lyricist and director) and recorded with composer David Del Tredici; recorded with Laurie Anderson on ‘Life On A String’; on ‘Jazz Passengers In Love’; and performed with Antony and the Johnsons, Dudley Saunders, Carol Lipnik, and Chris Rael.

Kelly’s acting credits include the role of the opera singer Bartell D’Arcy in the Broadway production of ‘James Joyce’s The Dead’; starring as Spencer Reese in ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, a film by James Franco; as Cupid in Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’ directed by Neil Bartlett at A.R.T., 2005 Elliot Norton Award; as Jon/Persophene in Rinde Eckert’s ‘Orpheus X’, directed by Robert Wooduff, at A.R.T.; as Madame/Superior Mother in David Gordon’s ‘Uncivil Wars: Moving With Brecht & Eisler’; as The Narrator in John Cage’s ‘James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet’.

The Hudson Opera House offers a year-round schedule of arts and cultural programming in the former Hudson City Hall, which houses New York State’s oldest surviving theatre. Ongoing programs include concerts, readings, lectures, exhibitions, theatre and dance presentations, after-school programs, workshops, classes and community arts events like the annual Winter Walk on Warren Street.