This commentary is by John R. Killacky of South Burlington, who has written about artist Nye Ffarrabas in Seven Days and The Arts Fuse. He is the author of “because art: commentary, critique, & conversation” (Onion River Books).
Researching the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s for a video project brought me to the C.X. Silver Gallery in Brattleboro, where Nye Ffarrabas’s work is on permanent display. The gallery also serves as the repository of her archives.
Nye Ffarrabas (formerly Bici Forbes and Bici Hendricks) and others in Fluxus created intermedia events that pushed the boundaries of prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, architecture and theater — reimagining our perception of daily activities. Their radical aesthetics influenced subsequent postmodern performance and visual art.
There have been international exhibitions of Ffarrabas’s poems, performance scores, political sculptures, found objects, mail art postcards, and word boxes. Her pieces are in museum collections around the country, including Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
She participated in Happenings with Allan Kaprow and George Segal and in avant-garde festivals with Charlotte Moorman. She went on mushroom forays with John Cage and dined with Marcel Duchamp. Her early work from the 1960s was exhibited at New York’s Judson Gallery, and she was featured in a Yoko Ono film.
In a gallery visit, Ffarrabas told me about her artistic process: “I work with what I find around me, either objects or words, and I go from there. Art has no obligation to be pretty. It does have an obligation to be relevant in its time.”
Her early pieces are revelatory. A simple, everyday object — a whole egg — is encased in a plaster cube bearing the red, rubber-stamped text: “EGG/TIME EVENT ONE HEN EGG DO NOT OPEN FOR 100 YEARS” and dated “Mar 21 1966.”
Just as compelling is her “Dinner Service” (1966), a table setting for four with hubcaps as plates, and pliers, hammers and screwdrivers as silverware.
In 1971, her then husband, Geoff Hendricks, asked what they should do for their 10th anniversary. “Let’s get a divorce,” she answered jokingly. ‘A FLUX Divorce!’ they both exclaimed at once, “and we were off and running,” she told me.
Kate Millet, Ono and John Lennon, neighbor Louise Bourgeois, and other art world friends came to the party at the couple’s brownstone. Cultural critic Jill Johnston improvised on the piano and wrote about the event later in her weekly column in the Village Voice.
The couple strung barbed wire to divide the rooms and sawed their bed in half. They donned a pair of winter coats sewed together back-to-back, inviting guests to pull them apart. Material remnants from the event are in the collection at the Museum of Modern Art.
After the divorce, Ffarrabas dropped her married surname, Hendricks, and continued creating under her given name, Bici Forbes. She and her two children moved to a sixth-floor loft in lower Manhattan. “I didn’t have any marketable skills, and the kids were going crosstown to school,” she said. “It was complicated, so we moved back home to Cambridge, MA to live with one of my sisters.”
Life changes ensued: “I wasn’t trying to put myself forward as an artist; they weren’t ready for this stuff.” She became a psychotherapist and practiced for a few years, “but it was hard being near my family. I’d been in New York too long for a conservative Boston family to understand.”
In 1982, she moved permanently to Brattleboro, where she continued her creative endeavors. She worked for Child Protective Services and volunteered in AIDS hospice work. In 1993, she changed her name to Nye Ffarrabas. “I wanted to just be me,” she recalled. “I spent the first 60 years of my life with other people’s ideas of who I was — the next 60 is all mine!”
In 2011, Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art presented Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, a show that included Ffarrabas’s work. This exhibition caught the attention of Brattleboro’s Cai Xi Silver and her husband, Adam.
In 2014, their C.X. Silver Gallery hosted Nye Ffarrabas: A Walk on the Inside, a 50-year retrospective exhibition, accompanied by a catalog. In it, her first curator, Jon Hendricks, reminded readers that “careers have been made on the back of her pioneering artwork.”
To commemorate the artist’s 91st birthday last month, the gallery published The Friday Book of White Noise, an annotated gathering from her notebooks of drawings, poems, essays, event scores, exhibition concepts, and quotidian life entries that illuminate the inspiration behind her extraordinary praxis.
