(b Riga, 3 March 1946). Latvian performance artist and teacher. As a central figure in Latvia’s small hippy community of the 1960s, he declared his liberation from the cultural prescriptions of Soviet life. Though trained in clothing design at Riga’s Applied Arts High School (1964–7), he was more profoundly shaped by the music, film and fashion innovations of Western counter-culture. In late August 1972, with his musician wife, Inta Grinberga (b 1955), he staged the happening Jesus Christ’s Wedding, notable not only as the début of performance art in Latvia but also as an expression of religious belief in violation equally of Soviet atheism and of conventional Christian doctrine. Considered subversive, a private photography exhibition in his apartment was raided by state security forces at this time. Grinbergs’s performances and body-art works during the 1970s and 1980s explored issues of free expression, sexual identity, politics of the body, human interaction with nature, ethnographic preservation (particularly of the Liv tribe) and the supposed boundaries separating art and life. His conclusions challenged Latvian mores as often as they refuted Soviet social theory, and in its sociopolitical trenchancy his work can be considered a precursor to the performance art of MIERVALDIS POLIS and the WORKSHOP FOR THE RESTORATION OF UNFELT SENSATIONS. With no chance of state support for his artistic activities (1976) Grinbergs began a teaching career that has been equally revolutionary, achieving sensational results with marginalized youth, as celebrated in Lazima Zurgina’s documentary film about his art-therapy methods, The Ugly Duckling, Humanity’s Child (1985).