Marian Zazeela was an American visual artist and vocalist, born in 1940 and died in New York on 28 March 2024. After studying at Bennington College with Paul Feeley and Tony Smith, she developed a style of abstract calligraphic strokes, shown in her first exhibition in 1960. From 1962 she sang with La Monte Young, whom she married in 1963, and with the Theatre of Eternal Music, for which she also designed the visual material.
Her environments of coloured light grew out of those drawings. The Magenta Lights was the centrepiece of the Dream House commissioned by Dia on Harrison Street between 1979 and 1985, and her light remains half of the Dream House experience. In 1970 she and Young became disciples of Pandit Pran Nath, studying the Kirana style of Hindustani singing, and she continued to perform as a vocalist until 2019. She also appeared in Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures (1963).