Bibbe Hansen believes in serendipity — and with good reason. Over sushi with artist Shanekia McIntosh, she reflects on how chance has threaded itself through every chapter of her legendary life, from Andy Warhol’s the Silver Factory to her creative use of the virtual reality platform Second Life.
I walk with Bibbe Hansen along the main tree-lined drag of Hudson, New York’s Warren Street as we make our way uptown to our lunch spot, Wasabi. In our little corner seat, she tells me that her grandfather was a tailor, a craft to which the work of her son, the fibre artist Channing Hansen, is not unlike. The creative process of her other son — the ever-evolving musician, Beck — is not too different from the collage pieces of her father, Fluxus artist Al Hansen. If that’s the case, then Bibbe Hansen is an amalgamation of it all, and more. A poet, performance artist, actress and musician — though her early sixties girl group recorded only one song, she notes, it charted well in Canada — her practice extends across multiple media and forms of expression, mostly centred around themes of memory and existence.
It was also serendipity when she met Andy Warhol the day after leaving New York State juvenile detention. Months beforehand, her father had taken out an ad in an underground newspaper, reading “B-I-B-B-E” in big, black letters. “It told me to give it up and get off the streets, to call him,” she recalls. “There was a phone number.” Hansen, thirteen years old, would return home after cutting school and running around Queens and Downtown Manhattan. Her father informed her that it was either him or her, and he certainly wasn’t going, so off to the penitentiary she went.
Six months later, on the day after her release, she participated in what she calls the “Saturday Ritual” — a practice that the downtown artists of the time often engaged in, of strolling through 59th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue, then going up to Madison Avenue to check out the latest shows in the galleries. Everyone would end the day at Stark’s on Broadway. Hansen describes it as the social event and survey of the scene.
There she was at Stark’s, awaiting her burger. There sat her father with Roy Lichtenstein and Ivan Karp, chatting away, though she wasn’t engaged. It was the burger that had her attention; it had been six months since she’d been able to enjoy such finery. As she took her first bite, a man across the seat turned to her and asked, “So, what do you do?” Before she could answer, her father exclaimed, “I’ve just sprung her from jail!” This caught the man’s attention. Hansen mimics Andy Warhol’s shocked expression, her eyes widening, almost bulging from their sockets. “Please! Tell us about that!” This is how Bibbe Hansen, at fourteen years old, became the youngest of the Warhol superstars, starring in Prison (1965), a film based on her life, alongside Edie Sedgwick and Marie Menken. Alongside her participation in other projects and her role as an active member of the renowned Silver Factory, Hansen found herself at the centre of one of the most monumental art scenes in American history when she was only a child.
Hansen’s work in her newest book of poetry, Factory Poems (2025), reflects on her time at the Silver Factory. The collection features more renowned and named artists — pioneers and raconteurs, or as we know them, superstars — who have become closely entwined and evaluated within the scene: Candy Darling, Stephen Shore, and John Giorno, alongside lesser-known but equally influential superstars. She unearths her memories of neglected figures, like Dorothy Dean. Dean of the School / of all things proper / Prim to the rim and / brim of / three-martini lunches / and too many brunches, Hansen writes. One would think the presence of a Black female superstar during the Factory would have more documentation or scholarship. Hansen manages to describe Dorothy Dean in a way that I can immediately picture — an intelligent, fun, and strict presence. Towards the end of the poem, Hansen laments that she misses her company and incomparable intelligence. I wonder if Dorothy occupied a unique role for Hansen in the Silver Factory — someone who recognised her youth and treated her accordingly, as a child.
Factory Poems reframes these figures, seemingly dominated by outsiders’ perspectives, with a human touch. The poems that comprise the collection seem to explore a community of artists who worked and played together. Although the Factory had a strong social aspect, Hansen tells me, it was primarily a workplace — at least during the daytime. “Some people had a closer relationship with Andy and the Factory, while others opted in. I wouldn’t write about Bob Dylan as a Factory person, for example, though he was there once or twice. Most of the people I’m writing about are women like Marie Menken — she inspired so many experimental filmmakers. I want people to remember the women!” We chuckle regretfully at the neglect and exclusion of the Factory’s women from art historical documentation.
Each line in this collection serves as a recollection of her friendships, capturing them through Hansen’s grounded gaze that humanises and balances out the over-mythologising surrounding the glamorous lives and tragic demises of the artists of that era. Though not its explicit goal, the collection begins as a memorial: “It was pretty simple to start. People I knew were dying. I would be invited to speak and memorialise them at funerals and memorials, and my response was to write a poem and read it generally. After a while, I had a stack, and then I thought, Wow, how about writing about some people who are still with us and others we lost long ago? It just started filling up the spaces,” Hansen states in her signature laid-back tone.
Another unearthing is her memorial for Freddie Herko, a recurring figure of interest in Hansen’s repertoire. She and her childhood best friend, Jan Kerouac, attended workshops he ran at the Judson Dance Theater, and they had quite a crush. “We were, like, fangirls for Freddie Herko. Hello! Have you seen pictures of this man? Gay or straight, we didn’t care. We were wild for him!” Herko was a regular dancer in her father’s Happenings, and he would trade work so she could attend the workshops, a regular practice for the Downtown scene of yore. Perhaps it is this nostalgia and fanaticism, or perhaps the tragedy that surrounds his suicide, that draws Hansen back to Herko. Known for his immense talent and beauty, the dancer grew depressed as his drug addiction destabilised his once-promising career. As the story goes, Herko invited everyone in the scene to a rooftop Happening, promising to conclude it by jumping off the roof. No one came. Days later, running into an old lover who, noticing how unwell he seemed, offered him a meal and a bath. Afterwards, as Mozart’s Coronation Mass played, Herko danced nude through the apartment. When the music reached its final notes, he leapt through the window in a grand jeté.
Hansen would relay this in a video piece, Red Dog for Freddie Herko (2014), a virtual performance she created in Second Life, the 3D virtual reality platform she has been using for over two decades, co-founding a digital performance troupe in the programme that brings Fluxus’s performance art into the virtual realm. The piece incorporates a poem by Diana Di’Parma, Herko’s best friend, written in memory of him — as well as her writing, a sound collage she created using city soundscapes, and the avatars of her troupe members, with Hansen orchestrating it all in the centre. In her poem for Herko, she describes their friendship: Heart children we went running while walking / wild in the pre-dawn back-alley ways / and laughed – in spite of everything.”
During the pandemic, there was an influx of performance artists who began experimenting with digital avatars and virtual reality to create work. It was a medium that Hansen had been exploring for well over twenty years. She would describe that as another serendipitous moment, but to me, it proves my working theory that Hansen tends to be ahead of the curve, no matter what.
Herko’s death was tragic but, unfortunately, a fate we recognise all too well: a brilliant artist loses themselves to addiction, and their life is gone too soon. Hansen remarks several times, briefly, that it was just Downtown. “There was stuff going on on every street corner. That’s not an especially degenerate aspect of the Factory. That was just part of the social fabric of that life. In the Factory, there were very few drugs at all,” she adds. “If you wanted to get high, you went up to the roof or down the street.” The drugs and such were standard operating procedures at that time, and while some would be able to escape the more tragic endings, it’s something that happened.
The collection also features a poem for the most famous of the superstars — Edie Sedgwick. Hansen’s memorial of her paints the picture of two young girls, in love with fashion and pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable until Sedgwick no longer cared to do so. Hansen recounts their friendship: Universal party line connecting the / interplanetary zeitgeist / with a Direct line to God. It almost echoes her poem to Herko: Circling spheres of connecting Influences we / laughed, pranced and danced the loneliness away — underlying feelings of disenfranchisement between the laughs and adventures seem to be something they shared.
Hansen jokes, “People always ask, Why aren’t you in Chelsea Girls? It’s because I went back to jail.” Did this occur after meeting Andy Warhol? I realise, in hindsight, that this was a funny thing to ask, as if being a Warhol superstar would exempt her from the consequences of being an underage truant in the early sixties. She remarks, deadpan, that she had been in and out of the penitentiary quite a few times. I ask how long the total was, and she says she never counted, but it was “too fucking long” and she had “absconded” from her last stint. She signed out for leave and never returned, keeping her head down, moving to St. Thomas, cutting off contact with everyone until she turned eighteen and was free from the system, dyeing her hair black, and obtaining a fake ID under the name of Barbara Hanley. “There are still a couple of people in the world who call me Barbara. I chose Barbara because you can nickname it Bibbe, and it has the same initials. I thought that would give me a better shot at remembering it.” Eventually, Hansen found herself in Los Angeles, met her first husband, had children, ran the art-centred Troy Café, began her drag king act — but that’s a story for another day. Do not fret, eager readers, it will soon be published in a memoir that Hansen is currently working on.
How did Hansen manage to be in the mix for so many different important counter-cultural moments? Although her adventurous spirit predates Warhol, she credits him with inspiring her to keep an open mind throughout the years: “Curiosity and fascination were Andy’s great gifts. It was his art process, and how that worked, and what I could share by spending time with him. He was endlessly fascinated by everything and everyone. Well, almost everything and almost everyone, like, Oh wow, look at that. How does that work? What do you do? Isn’t that fabulous! That’s so gorgeous. How do you do that? What’s that about? Who are you? What is that? Electric chairs, ew! You know? He followed his fears and his dreams, his passions and affections. That was his process and practice. The practice was the making. The process was the living, the experience — this interaction between one’s life in the universe and one’s environment and the people in it.”
Hansen pauses for a second, taking a sip of her drink. “I do a lot of memorialising. It’s funny because I don’t consider myself one of those people who is completely attached to the past. I feel thrilled in the here and now. I like these people, I like this stuff, I like this music, I like this art. I love all of this right now,” she reflects. I noticed that while talking to Hanse about this poetry collection, she largely speaks about her friends in the present tense, rather than the past, making it almost difficult to parse out who died and when. It’s as if they are all still here, just someplace far away.
Written by Shanekia McIntosh
