Cooper Hewitt says...
George Maciunas was a founding member and central coordinator of Fluxus, a collective of artists who radically subverted, revolutionized, and democratized art by breaking down boundaries and cultural norms. Born in Lithuania, Maciunas fled the Red Army in 1944, eventually settling in Long Island with his family in 1948. After studying art, graphic design, architecture, and musicology at Cooper Union, the Carnegie Institute of Technology Pittsburgh, and the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU (1949-60) he began to focus his efforts on the Fluxus movement, writing up a manifesto and creating aesthetic and conceptual cohesion across the group’s output. While coordinating the happenings and productions of the Fluxus cooperative in SoHo, New York, he also put his academic training to use as an architect and graphic designer at commercial firms and at a U.S. Air Force base in Germany (1961). Highly organizational, Maciunas’ work is characterized by chronology, diagrams, genealogies, atlases, and charts, which unify his oeuvre both thematically and aesthetically. [1] Maciunas died of cancer in 1978 at the age of 46.
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[1] George Maciunas Foundation Inc. “About: George Maciunas / Fluxus Foundation Inc.” georgemaciunas.com. http://georgemaciunas.com/about/ (accessed December 6, 2018).
