1960s Fluxus Artist Nye Ffarrabas Celebrated at Brattleboro’s C.X. Silver Gallery

She went to happenings with Allan Kaprow and on mushroom treks with John Cage. She was in a Yoko Ono film, performed in avant-garde festivals and dined with Marcel Duchamp. Nye Ffarrabas, aka Bici (Forbes) Hendricks, was a central figure in the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s. She and others created intermedia events that pushed the boundaries of prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music and theater. They erased distinctions between art and life as they celebrated daily activities. Their radical aesthetics influenced subsequent postmodern performance and visual art.

Ffarrabas' works are in museum collections around the country, including at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. But several factors conspired to blur art history, leaving far too few who remember Ffarrabas' legacy. After divorcing her husband, Geoff Hendricks, she left New York, had multiple careers while still making art and changed her name.

In 1982, she moved permanently to Brattleboro, where she has created art and worked as a psychotherapist ever since. There, at C.X. Silver Gallery, her legacy is known and celebrated. In 2014, the gallery hosted "Nye Ffarrabas: A Walk on the Inside," a 50-year retrospective. Many of Ffarrabas' works are still on exhibit at the gallery, which serves as the repository of her archives.

Seven Days 27 (36) pp.32-34, article by John Killacky photo of Nye by Dona Ann McAdams