Edizioni Conz

Dick Higgins, Hommage to Africa, 1989, Silkscreen on cloth, 238 × 255 cm, Edition of 50 plus VIII AP

Courtesy of Archivio Conz, Berlin

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Dick Higgins (1938 Cambridge, England – 1998 Quebec, Canada) was an influential artist, poet, editor, and—more than anything else—a prolific theorist of experimental arts. His inquisitiveness and enthusiasm made him one of the most distinctive personalities of the avant-garde movements. Higgins was an instigator of Happenings and a co-founder of Fluxus, together with George Maciunas, George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, and his wife Allison Knowles. In 1963, Higgins founded Something Else Press, a publishing house responsible for promoting and disseminating the works of highly acclaimed artists and writers of the twentieth century, including Gertrude Stein, Ray Johnson, and Dieter Roth. With the first issue of the Something Else Press Newsletter in 1965, Higgins coined the term “intermedia” as a descriptive stance, a possibility of naming artistic approaches that did not limit their field of operation to a question of artistic media but rather tended to elude established norms and categories. Higgins received a DAAD scholarship in Berlin (1981–82) and a Pollock-Krasner grant (1993). A substantial retrospective was held at the Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter (1995) in Høvikodden, Norway. His works can be found in numerous private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, and the mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien in Vienna.