The Dick Higgins Collection includes rare Fluxus objects, prints, drawings, musical scores, performance documentation, games, books, letters, and other works by a wide circle of avant garde visual artists, musicians, writers, and performance artists, such as John Cage, Alison Knowles, Claes Oldenberg, Allan Kaprow, and of course Dick Higgins.

While diverse, the works featured are concerned with breaking barriers between genres, media, "high" and "low" culture, artist and viewer, museum and society, the ephemeral and the permanent, and between art and everyday life. Fluxus artists remain forever tricksters, non sequiters, and iconoclasts, but their work fostered an accessibility, humor, and playful simplicity which has seen increasing influence over the last 30 years of contemporary art.

This online archive presents extensive documentation of the collection, the artists' lives and experience, and their ideas. Fluxus art insists on direct experience, on art as a communal and proactive gesture, and this site invites deeper exploration of a rarely exposed but vital movement.

An exhibition and public programming on this collection was Guest Curated by Lisa Moren and organized by the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery at UMBC, Fall 2003. A catalog featuring the writings of scholars on this collection such as Hannah Higgins, Owen Smith, Ken Friedman, Ina Blom, Marina Grzinic, Kathy O'Dell and others is available from Cynthia Wayne, Kuhn Gallery, UMBC. ($20 or $15 for students)
410-455-2270 or cwayne@umbc.edu.

This site is supported by the Designated Research Initiative Funds (DRIF) at UMBC, and the Dick Higgins Estate.

This site was conceived, designed and implemented
by Lisa Moren.

Photography: Cyriaco Lopes Pereira
Design Consultants: Guenet Abraham, Cyriaco Lopes Pereira, Jay Perry and Emily Wilson
Production: Cyriaco Lopes Pereira and Jay Perry
Editorial Assistant: Eugene Nable