Barbara Ess, a musician and photographer in New York’s no-wave scene, has died, according to Artforum. Tim Davis, a professor at Bard College, confirmed the news on social media Thursday evening (March 4th). She was 73 years old.
Ess co-founded the all-woman trio Y Pants in 1979 with Gail Vachon and Virginia Piersol. The band recorded an EP, Little Music from the 1980s, with Glenn Branca before releasing their full-length self-titled edition in 1982. The group broke up without releasing another album, but Ess continued to make music, working with Branca through the 1980s and 1990s. She also performed with the groups Disband and The Static. In 2001 she released an album with filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh called Radio Guitar, and Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label released the project.
Ess developed a career as a photographer to complement her work as a musician and multimedia work on the publication Just Another Asshole. Much of her photography consisted of large-format hole-making – a practice that she had taken up in 1983. A book about her perforation work I Am Not This Body was published in 2005. Some of her later work examined surveillance on the United States-Mexico border. She entered the photography department at Bard College in 1997, where she taught for the rest of her life.
