January 1, 2008, Geoff Hendricks, Headstand

Photograph: Hope Sandrow

on the road open air studio Shinnecock Hills spacetime

Geoffrey Hendricks, (1931 - 2018) was most renowned for his artwork with clouds, headstands performed all over the globe, and cooking delicious macrobiotic meals, was born in Littleton, New Hampshire in 1931.

Hendricks attended Amherst College, Cooper Union Art School, and Columbia University, where he got his Masters degree in 1962. Since the mid-60s he was active with Fluxus, and when Happenings, Fluxus, and Pop Art were just getting underway, he had the idea of “painting sky on everything.” His first show of sky work was at the Bianchini Gallery in New York (1966), followed by Tokyo Gallery (1968). He is sometimes referred to as “Cloudsmith.”

The most recent exhibition of his work, land / sky / dreams was shown posthumously at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery/New York City in 2024, Other solo exhibitions were at the Egon Schiele Art Centrum in Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic; Galerie Esplanade, Bad Ischl, Austria; UC Santa Cruz Art Gallery in California; and the Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York City all in 2006; and at UnimediaModern, Genoa, Italy and Galerie Etage, Münster, Germany in 2008. A retrospective, Between Earth & Sky (in knowing one, one will know the other traveled through Canada, and an earlier retrospective, Day into Night, went to museums in Scandinavia and Poland. He participated in numerous group shows and performances in Europe, Asia, and North America, including the most important Fluxus exhibitions and festivals from Happenings & Fluxus, Kunstverein, Cologne (1970), and 1962 Wiesbaden FLUXUS 1982, Wiesbaden, Germany (1982), on to the recent Fluxus Continue 1963-2003 in Nice, France, and Fluxus East, opening in Berlin, Fall 2007, and traveling through Europe, ending in Norway in October 2010. In July 2010, he participated in Fluxus Banquet II in Lodz, Poland, and in March 2011 he had a residency at the Nirox Foundation in South Africa. In 2003 Hendricks curated Critical Mass, Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia, and Rutgers University, 1958-1972 at the Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA, and the Mason Gross Art Galleries, New Brunswick, NJ, together with a restaging of George Maciunas' Flux-Mass. The catalog for this exhibition, C. Carr has called “an invaluable addition to avant-garde history.” He was Professor Emeritus of Visual Art at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he taught from 1956 to 2004. He lived and worked in New York City and Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada together with his husband, Sur Rodney (Sur).

His estate is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery