Artist, composer, and singer Jill Kroesen was an essential figure in the1970s downtown New York performance milieu, working at the intersection of experimental music and then-emerging performance art. After studying at Mills College with composer Robert Ashley, she embarked on a series of performances that defied categorization, such as Stanley Oil and His Mother: A Systems Portrait of the Western World (1977), The Original Lou and Walter Story (1978) and Excuse Me, I Feel Like Multiplying (1979). With these performances, she invented a space between structuralist theater, graphically-scored musical composition, and cabaret. In the words of performance critic Sally Banes, “condensing political events with soap opera plots and infantile rationalizations about the way the world works,” Kroesen’s “systems portraits,” as she came to call her works, manifested socioeconomic, sexual, and gender politics through funny, ramshackle, and chaotic performances. Archival documentation of these works was presented at the Whitney in the exhibition Rituals of Rented Island in 2013. Kroesen’s performances almost always include several of her original songs, and with names like Honey, You’re So Mean and Fay Shism Blues ; they add another layer of satire to her projects. In 1982, Kroesen released Stop Vicious Cycles under the Lovely Music record label, an LP compilation that stands up as a work in its own right. She returned to the Whitney Museum in 2016 with a new show, Collecting Injustices, Unnecessary Suffering.