12 Facts About Dennis Oppenheim

Dennis Oppenheim was an American conceptual artist, performance artist, earth artist, sculptor and photographer.

Dennis Oppenheim's early artistic practice is an epistemological questioning about the nature of art, the making of art and the definition of art: a meta-art that arose when strategies of the Minimalists were expanded to focus on site and context.

Dennis Oppenheim was born in Electric City, Washington, while his father was working as an engineer on the Grand Coulee Dam.

Dennis Oppenheim later attended the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he met his first wife, Karen Marie Cackett.

Dennis Oppenheim moved to New York in 1966 and taught art at a nursery school in Northport and a junior high school in Smithtown, Long Island, while working toward his first one-person New York show in 1968 when he was 30 years old.

Dennis Oppenheim's third child, Chandra, was born to Phyllis Jalbert that year.

In 1972, Dennis Oppenheim was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts.

Dennis Oppenheim occupied a live-work loft in Tribeca from 1967 until his death from cancer on January 21,2011, aged 72.

For Reading Position for Second Degree Burn Dennis Oppenheim lay on a beach for five hours with an open book on his chest, exposing himself to the sun.

Dennis Oppenheim collaborated with his first wife in Forming Sounds and referred to his father, David Oppenheim, in the works Polarties and Identity Transfer.

Post-performance- biographical works: In a series of eight works Dennis Oppenheim called "post-performance," the artist spoke through his surrogate performance figures about the end of the avant-garde, his own art-making, in dialogue as opposites or as in Theme for a Major Hit acted under motorized control to a rock song with his lyrics, "It ain't what you do, it's what makes you do it," recorded by a band of Soho artists.

Public Sculpture: Dennis Oppenheim experimented with titled and cantilevered form in Device to Root Out Evil.