Remembering Geoffrey Hendricks

This exhibition in honor of Geoff Hendricks presents an abbreviated view of a complex artist, teacher, and mentor with a special connection to Rutgers University. Hired to teach in the art department at Douglass College in 1956, he remained a beloved faculty member at the university until his retirement in 2003. Hendricks was a full participant in the energetic revitalization of the curriculum at the college and the arts that made Rutgers a renowned center for avant-garde explorations in performance, music, visual art, poetry, and dance. 

While Hendricks was an important member of Fluxus, he was also a painter and performance artist with an international reputation. His friend and fellow Flux-artist Dick Higgins gave him the eminently appropriate moniker “Cloudsmith” for the many paintings of clouds that he produced on canvas, paper, bed sheets, clothing, a pair of worn leather boots that were subsequently cast in bronze, a bunker, a Volkswagen, road signs, shovels, and other objects of everyday life. These cloud paintings tied Hendricks to nature, to the wide skies of Cape Breton where he worked and relaxed, and to artists of earlier centuries who painted illusionistic views of skies and clouds that opened up ceilings of baroque churches and palazzos.

Hendricks was also known for the headstands he performed across the globe. He described them as the “bonsai” of performance, and they seem to have encapsulated his faith in the capacity of art to upend expectations and provide alternative perspectives.