AllanKaprow

Biography

Allan Kaprow (1927 Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA – 2006 Encinitas, California, USA) is acknowledged as the father of Happenings: assemblages of events taking place in more than one spatial and temporal situation, activated by performers and the audience. Kaprow was one of the first modern artists to defy the commodification of art and campaigned for its liberation from restrictive museum structures. Alongside the term Happening, another fundamental entity for Kaprow is constituted around the concept of the “environment.” The term denotes a large-scale, interactive, immersive installation involving an enclosed space. Kaprow was awarded two National Endowment for the Arts grants (1974 and 1979) and a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship (1979). His oeuvre includes not only performance art but also assemblages, paintings, and collages, which have been presented in galleries and museums including the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Tate Modern, London; the mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Artworks (13)