15 Facts About Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci's work is considered to have influenced artists including Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, Bruce Nauman, and Tracey Emin, among others.

Retrospectives of Vito Acconci's work have been organized by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and his work is in numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Vito Acconci has been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and American Academy in Rome.

Vito Acconci died on April 28,2017, in Manhattan at age 77.

Vito Acconci received a BA in literature from the College of the Holy Cross in 1962 and an MFA in literature and poetry from the University of Iowa.

Vito Acconci began his career as a poet, editing and self-publishing the poetry magazine 0 TO 9 with Bernadette Mayer in the late 1960s.

In Seedbed Vito Acconci lay hidden underneath a gallery-wide ramp installed at the Sonnabend Gallery, masturbating while vocalizing into a loudspeaker his fantasies about the visitors walking above him on the ramp.

Nemser later did an interview with Vito Acconci which became the cover piece for Arts Magazine.

Later, in January 1983, Vito Acconci was a visiting artist at Middlebury College.

Vito Acconci turned to the creation of furniture and prototypes of houses and gardens in the late 1980s, and in 1988, the artist founded Acconci Studio, which focused on theoretical design and building.

Vito Acconci designed the United Bamboo store in Tokyo in 2003, and collaborated on concept designs for interactive art vehicle Mister Artsee in 2006, among others including the highly acclaimed: Murinsel in Graz, Austria.

In 2008, in an interview with Brian Sherwin for Myartspace, Vito Acconci discussed Seedbed at length.

In 2014, Vito Acconci was featured in a video segment, produced by Marc Santo, in which he talks about a few of his favorite projects that were never completed, including a Skate Park in San Jose and a museum of needles in Ichihara, Japan.

Vito Acconci taught at many institutions, including the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax; San Francisco Art Institute; California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; Cooper Union; School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Yale University; University of Iowa, Pratt Institute; and the Parsons School of Design.

Vito Acconci had been married to the artist Rosemary Mayer in the 1960s.