John Killacky, an artist, former Flynn executive director and Vermont state legislator whose steely resilience and dogged defense of artistic freedom came packaged in a courtly demeanor and serene smile, died at his home in South Burlington from metastatic prostate cancer on Monday, November 2, acc ording to his husband, Larry Connolly. Killacky was 74. After eight years at the helm of the Flynn, where he welcomed low-income and neurodivergent audience members into the Burlington theater, Killacky arrived in Montpelier to serve two terms in the Vermont House of Representatives. He brought a desire to improve Vermonters’ day-to-day lives and a fire to protect their rights, former colleagues said. Throughout his life, he wrote and made art. Sandgate photographer Dona Ann McAdams, a longtime friend and collaborator, called Killacky “the fiercest advocate for all things good for the arts.’’ Asked to describe his impact on the art world, she said, “Where do you even start? … It’s an international, global ripple.” Killacky was known as a bold supporter of provocative art when he moved to Vermont in 2010 to lead the Flynn, then the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts. He came from California, where he had been program manager of the philanthropic San Francisco Foundation for seven years and executive director of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for six years before that. But it was in Minneapolis in the early 1990s that Killacky cemented his reputation as a champion of artistic expression and a foil to conservative leaders who sought to restrict it. As curator of performing arts at the Walker Art Center from 1988 to 1996, he presented more than 5,000 artists in a broad range of mediums. Among them were members of the “NEA Four” — Karen Finley, Tim Miller, Holly Hughes and John Fleck — performance artists who in 1990 were denied grants from the National Endowment for the Arts because their work was considered obscene. Congress that year approved legislation requiring the agency to consider “general standards of decency” in funding decisions. The NEA stopped issuing grants to individual artists and remained embroiled in a “culture war” for several years. In 1994, Killacky found himself on the front lines. He presented “Four Scenes in a Harsh Life,” performance artist Ron Athey’s meditation on self-loathing, suffering, healing and redemption as a gay man amid the AIDS pandemic. In the piece, Athey, who was HIV-positive, inserted hypodermic needles into his arm and acupuncture-like needles into his scalp with the help of assistants. He cut incisions into the back of another artist — who was not infected with HIV — and daubed the blood with paper towels, which he then suspended over the audience on a line. Weeks later, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published the first of several stories about the show, thrusting the Walker into the national spotlight. Athey’s sold-out show had received $150 in federal funds. That single performance, before 100 people, “dominated debate” as the U.S. House of Representatives considered the NEA’s budget for the following year, the New York Times reported. Conservative pundits such as Rush Limbaugh and several U.S. legislators decried the performance, including senator Jesse Helms, who denounced Athey as a “cockroach” on the Senate floor. “I frequently got in senator Helms’ craw,” Killacky said in 2004. Blood-red graffiti marred the Walker’s glass doors; hate mail and hostile phone messages arrived for Killacky, who quoted one in a 2016 lecture at Brown University: “We got the abortion doctor. You’re next.” Life was decidedly quieter in Vermont. But at the Flynn, Killacky faced the sizable challenge of succeeding Andrea Rogers, who had spearheaded the conversion of a former Burlington movie theater into the city’s leading performing arts center and served as its only executive director for 30 years. Over his eight-year tenure, Killacky grew the nonprofit’s budget from $6 million to $7.7 million and nearly doubled its endowment from $6 million to $11 million. “He ran a good ship,” said Steve MacQueen, whom Killacky hired in 2012 as artistic director. “He was famous in the world of arts presenting,” MacQueen said, adding that he initially feared Killacky would encroach on his job. Instead, MacQueen said, “He let me do whatever I wanted to do, and then he would go out and support it.” This, despite the two men’s wildly differing tastes. Where Killacky liked dark, heavy art, MacQueen prized performances with humor or beauty. “This one’s too beautiful” was a common Killacky critique, MacQueen recalled. “He would actually say that fairly frequently.” MacQueen, now the executive director of the Vermont International Film Foundation, described Killacky as a decisive leader with a strong vision, whose honesty and charm served him well as the face of the Flynn. Killacky expanded the organization’s commitment to access and inclusiveness, collaborating with dozens of local human and social service agencies to provide discounted tickets to their clients and generating $30,000 each year for scholarships to Flynn classes and camps. John Killacky and the cast of ‘Charlie Brown’ at the Flynn Space in 2018 Credit: File: Oliver Parini Inclusivity under Killacky also extended to different physical abilities. The Flynn dimmed the lights and turned down the sound in “sensory-friendly” shows for kids with autism or other neurodivergent conditions. Killacky curated exhibitions of visual art created by people with disabilities. In addition to presenting its own performing arts season, the Flynn is a rental venue and home for other arts organizations. Rather than view those presenters as competitors, Killacky promoted their shows in the Flynn’s print and online materials. “One Flynn” became the theater’s catchphrase. An arts career seemed an unlikely path for John Raymond Killacky. He was born on June 24, 1952, the third of five children who grew up in a lower-middle-class family on the South Side of Chicago. “Irish Catholic, which means Irish Catholic, which means Irish Catholic,” he said of his upbringing in a 2022 interview with queer history website Outwords. His father and both of his grandfathers worked at the Chicago stockyards. The family wasn’t particularly cultured, Killacky told Seven Days senior multimedia producer Eva Sollberger in a 2014 episode of “Stuck in Vermont.” After seeing the Alvin Ailey dance company on a school trip when he was about 10 years old, he told Sollberger, he announced at the family dinner table that he wanted to be a modern dancer. In the video, Killacky popped his eyes wide to illustrate his parents’ response. But his mother enrolled him in dance class. Killacky knew he was gay in high school, he told Outwords, though he didn’t fully understand what that meant. “I was out, but there wasn’t anyone really to be out with,” he said. After dancing with the Chicago Moving Company, he won a scholarship to Harkness Ballet in New York City and moved there when he was 20 years old. The city’s 1973 gay pride parade fell on his 21st birthday. He and fellow cast members of the Jonathan Ned Katz play Coming Out! were introduced onstage at the parade’s terminus. “There were, like, 10,000 people in Washington Square Park,” Killacky told Outwords, “and I’m thinking, I’m not alone. I have a community. I have a tribe.” He lived around the corner from Andy Warhol, shifted to modern dance after taking workshops with choreographer Meredith Monk and toured with Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers. Unsure if he wanted to continue performing, he traveled in 1979 to the Himalayas to study with a Tibetan Buddhist leader. Upon returning to New York, he wrote in his 2021 book, because art: commentary, critique conversation, “I stumbled into arts administration.” He managed the dance companies of Laura Dean and Trisha Brown. It was around this time that members of the beloved community Killacky had found began to get sick. He was on Fire Island to celebrate the Fourth of July in 1981 when the New York Times ran a story headlined “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” “My notebooks list 119 friends lost to AIDS,” he wrote in his book. To channel his anger and grief, he made short films. His 1995 video “Stolen Shadows” screened at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2000 as part of its program ”Fever in the Archive: AIDS Activist Videotapes From the Royal S. Marks Collection.” In retrospect, much of the work in that show seemed naïve and tepid, Killacky told San Francisco Art Institute graduates in his 2002 commencement address. “Do the works have any lasting meaning?” he asked. Did they change government policy or help save lives? “Yes and no, but that’s not the point,” he continued. “We made those works to witness and survive overwhelming sadness, anger and despair. History will decide what’s good or not. That’s not our job as artists.” In 1988, after two years as general manager of the PepsiCo Summerfare, a performing arts festival in Purchase, N.Y., and two years as senior program officer for the arts at the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia, Killacky was recruited by the Walker Art Center. After Congress passed the 1990 “decency amendment,” grant recipients had to sign what Killacky called a “decency” form. “The Walker signed it,” he wrote in because art. “There was nothing indecent in what we presented.” Beauty was represented in the Walker’s seasons, he told Twin Cities PBS in 1992, but artists depicting the ugliness in society must be empowered as well, he said: “We’re going to be bringing in a piece by Reza Abdoh about Jeffrey Dahmer, and it’s a gruesome story. But to me, if Jeffrey Dahmers exists in our society, then we have to allow our artists to depict that and respond to that also.” As he told the Brown University audience in 2016: “Freedom of expression is a more precious commodity than taste.” In 1996, shortly before he left the Walker, Killacky underwent surgery for a tumor in his spinal cord. The man who ran marathons after he stopped dancing woke up paralyzed from the neck down. Within days, limited movement returned to the fingers on his right hand, and he asked to be wheeled to the computer lab so he could “peck at the keyboard,” he told San Francisco Art Institute graduates. “I needed to write to make sense of my disaster. The only impulse I trusted was the artistic one.” He asked for a mirror in rehab, believing that he could teach himself to stand visually because, as a dancer, he had relied on a mirror for feedback. “My dancer training got me to stand up,” he told Seven Days in 2010. “My marathon training got me to keep going.” It took another three months before he could walk, but he never fully recovered. Vermonters nearly always saw Killacky with a cane. “I don’t have strength in my legs anymore,” he told Sollberger in 2014. He lacked sensation on the right side of his body and proprioception — the body’s ability to sense its position and movements — on his left. A Shetland pony named Pacific Raindrop allowed him to dance and run again, he told Sollberger, who filmed Killacky driving a two-wheeled cart pulled by the little horse. “She’s my legs and my wings and my joy.” Once again, Killacky parlayed life into art. With his AIDS work, he sought “to make the body sacred again,” he wrote on his website; after becoming disabled, he “celebrated maligned bodies.” John Killacky (left) and Larry Connolly in the film ‘Holding On’ Credit: Courtesy of John Killacky With his husband, retired editor, educator, actor and director Larry Connolly, he made videos, including “Crip Shots,” portraits of six artists with disabilities, and “Dreaming Awake,” which juxtaposes dancers who have disabilities with Killacky seated in his wheelchair. With Bob Guter, founder of the now-defunct e-zine BENT: A Journal of Cripgay Voices, Killacky coedited Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories, a 2003 anthology that won a Lambda Literary Award. After leaving the Flynn in 2018, Killacky served two terms representing South Burlington in the Vermont House of Representatives. He brought a curiosity “about how this work can positively affect actual humans in their day-to-day lives,” said Rep. Tom Stevens (D-Waterbury), who chaired the House Committee on General, Housing and Military Affairs, of which Killacky was a member. Killacky was lead sponsor of the 2021 resolution to apologize for state-sanctioned eugenics. The resolution and the law that established the Vermont Truth and Reconciliation Commission started in his committee. When relatives of those targeted by the state’s eugenics efforts testified before the committee, Killacky sat in the chair closest to them, Stevens recalled. “His ability to sit there and exude a certain amount of welcome and peace … was really beneficial to the whole process,” he said. Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility was located in Killacky’s district, and he visited and listened to the women incarcerated there, said Maida Townsend, a fellow South Burlington representative. “He is one of the kindest souls that I ever have known,” she said. Killacky was gentle and soft-spoken, she continued, “unless there was a question of other people’s rights or people’s access to the building, access to services.” Then, she said, “he became fierce.” Killacky always invited her to his art events, she said. “And I would always go, and I’d struggle so hard to understand … because John’s pretty avant-garde, and I’m not, in terms of artistic matters, but he never stopped inviting me.” He also never stopped making art. After a medical exam last November, Killacky’s doctors suspected he had kidney stones. Three months later, in February, they diagnosed him with terminal cancer. “Metastasis,” the assemblage he created about his disease, was displayed at Burlington’s South End Art Hop in September. “As you leave this holy place,” he told the San Francisco art school graduates, “I remind you that your talents are absolutely necessary in a profane world. Just as I believe cloistered nuns and monks balance the frenzied pace of life and protected wetlands stabilize the ecosystem, I believe artists create a safe place for unsafe ideas in our world.” The post John Killacky, Former Flynn Director and State Legislator, Dies at 74 appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less