UMBC's Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery presents "Intermedia: The Dick Higgins Collection," on display through December 23. The Dick Higgins Collection, acquired by UMBC in 1999, features works by leading Fluxus artists, including Joseph Beuys, Alison Knowles, Seiichi Niikuni, Jackson Mac Low, Wolf Vostell, Ben Patterson, Al Hansen, George Brecht, Mieko Shiomi and Dick Higgins.
The exhibition is curated by Lisa Moren, assistant professor of visual arts at UMBC. A scholarly illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition, and includes essays by Ina Blom, Ken Friedman, Hannah Higgins and others.
Dick Higgins (1938-1998) was an influential visual artist, composer, poet and art theorist. Because his work transgressed many art forms, he coined the now-popular term intermedia, stating, "I find I never feel quite complete unless I'm doing all the arts-visual, musical and literary…that's why I developed the term intermedia, to cover my works that fall conceptually between these."
As a young artist in New York in the late 1950s, Higgins studied with composers John Cage and Henry Cowell. By 1961, he co-founded Fluxus, a seminal experimental art movement that held that change is the only constant. Immediately interdisciplinary and international, Fluxus blurred the boundaries of music, theatre, poetry, and visual art, and engaged artists, musicians, and poets from Japan, Korea, Europe, Brazil, New York and California.
By 1964 Higgins founded Something Else Press, a publishing house, in part to help disseminate the work of Fluxus artists and writings about their work. Something Else Press published editions of work by John Cage, Emmett Williams, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenberg, Gertrude Stein, Marshall McLuhan, Merce Cunningham, Dick Higgins and many other influential artists. By 1987, he authored the first scholarly work on pattern poetry through SUNY Press.
After Higgins's death in 1998, his wife, Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, and daughters Hannah Higgins and Jessica Higgins contributed much of Higgins's remarkable collection to UMBC's Albin O. Kuhn Library Special Collections. "Intermedia: The Dick Higgins Collection" is the first opportunity for the public to view this remarkable material, which includes visual and audio art, over a dozen limited edition boxes and hand printed folios (objects, printed matter, silkscreens, hand letter press prints including concrete poems), books, book jackets, pamphlets, newsletters, audio recordings, catalogs, journals, and other items.
"Intermedia: The Dick Higgins Collection" has received major funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The programs of the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery are supported in part by an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts, and by the Friends of the Library & Gallery. At UMBC, support has been provided by the Department of Visual Arts, the Dean of Arts & Sciences, and the Humanities Forum.
The exhibition is free and open to the public. The Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery hours are: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, 12 to 4:30 p.m.; Thursday, 12 to 8 p.m.; and Saturday, 1 to 5 p.m. The Gallery is closed on Sundays. For more information, call (410) 455-2270.
