Fluxus Collection Donated to MoMA

Courtesy MoMAGeorge Maciunas, Announcement of "Flux Shop & Mail Order Warehouse for Fluxus Newspaper No. 5" (1965)

NEW YORK—The Detroit developer Gilbert Silverman and his wife, Lila, have decided to donate their extensive collection of Fluxus works to the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Times reports.

Silverman first learned of Fluxus, the avant-garde movement of the 1960s and '70s whose best-known figures include Nam June Paik, Christo, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, and George Brecht, when he traveled to Japan in 1970. Since then he has assembled approximately 3,000 works in various mediums, more than 4,000 files’ worth of artist notebooks and correspondence and documents related to Fluxus events, and a library of over 1,500 volumes. All of it will go to MoMA, where he is an honorary trustee.

“I’ve been attached to three museums: the Modern, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Israel Museum,” said Silverman. “But the Modern is the Mount Everest of the contemporary art museums, and I wanted it to be available to the public. It just makes sense.”

For MoMA, the donation represents an important addition to the collection. “It is a whole sector of the 1960s and early ’70s that has not been a part of our narrative in the way American Pop art and Minimalism has,” said Peter Reed, the museum’s senior deputy director for curatorial affairs.
Published: February 13, 2009
source: ARTINFO
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/30403/fluxus-collection-donated-to-moma/