Xenia Cage

Xenia Kashevaroff was one of six daughters of Andrei Petrovich Kashevaroff (1863–1940), a dean of Alaskan churches who also ministered at Jackson, California, and Seattle, before returning to Juneau, and Martha (née Bolshanin). She studied art at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.[4][5] While she was a student at Reed, she was the subject in many of Edward Weston's photographs.[6]

Throughout her marriage to the musician and composer John Cage – from 1935 to 1945 – Xenia performed in his percussion ensemble.[7] Cage is believed to have been the "female performer" who smashed a lime ricky bottle into a can of broken glass at the culmination of John Cage's Construction in Metal.[8] In 1943, Cage exhibited an abstract mobile in Peggy Guggenheim's show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York.[9] The next year, Cage had a solo exhibition of her mobiles at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York.[8] In 1947, she exhibited another abstract mobile called Black Trap at the Art Institute of Chicago's American Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture 58th Annual: Abstract and Surrealist American Art curated by Katharine Kuh. This piece was made from wood, paper, and string.[10] Cage notably collaborated with artists Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp as a bookbinder (she studied bookbinding with Hazel Dreis),[11] and designed a chess table in tandem with a set created by Max Ernst.[12] By the 1950s, Cage had ceased to publicly exhibit her art, and worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. She also worked as a conservator at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York from 1968.[12][1]

In 1935, she married John Cage; they divorced in 1945 when a ménage à trois with Merce Cunningham became a private affair between the two men. Cage and Cunningham were together until Cage's death.[13] In a 1992 interview, John noted that their subsequent relationship had "not been particularly friendly", and said that due to her "barby" wit, "if I telephone her or write to her, I take my life in my hands". A pregnancy during the marriage ended in an abortion.[14]

At her death in 1995, "she was not a forgotten artist, but tragically, an unknown one", with virtually none of her artwork known to have survived.[1] Her friend and erstwhile musical collaborator Jean Erdman paid for her funeral. Her grave is in the family plot at the Evergreen Cemetery in Juneau.[15]