Nye Ffarrabas: Truth IS A Verb!

At 92, Nye Ffarrabas, formerly Bici Forbes Hendricks, occupies a significant place not only in the postmodern art world but also in our global cultural zeitgeist. During the early and mid-1960s, she (as Bici) was part of New York City’s Fluxus community, an experimental and creative laboratory that viewed life and art as inseparable and, in some respects, one and the same. 

This exhibition—Truth IS A Verb!—focuses on works published and distributed by The Black Thumb Press, which Ffarrabas founded in 1965, with contributions from her then husband Geoff Hendricks, also a Fluxus artist. Black Thumb’s goal was to expand visual and verbal stimuli, encourage exploration, and investigate new forms of “intermedia,” combining different media in unexpected ways. Truth IS A Verb! includes letters, postcards, and other text-based ephemera, such as a box of cards that provide instructions for different activities or how to achieve certain states of mind.

Ffarrabas and her fellow Fluxus artists made work that didn’t end with a product or an object—what is typically considered “art.” They chose to pursue the creative process rather than construct a fossil record. They developed, for example, musical scores to be performed, or kits that instructed people how to take specific steps in order to enact certain events. Ffarrabas contributed to this heady soup in many major ways, and corresponded and collaborated with artists who became household names—Yoko Ono, Claes Oldenburg, John Cage, George Brecht, John Lennon, Dick Higgins, George Maciunas, and many others—yet her own work is still being discovered. She may be one of the most historically significant “UnderKnown Artists” of our time.

One of Ffarrabas’screations that showed the spirit of shared interest and energy among Fluxus artists was “Mailing Cards,” which she made—or conducted—between 1965 and 1968, with Geoff Hendricks. They printed koans, aphorisms, and other small phrases, often accompanied by bold imagery, on small cards, which they sent out to fellow artists. Ffarrabas began with her and Hendricks’s own text-based and visual works; other artists and family members joined in to contribute. Many recipients responded by sending their own written musings back to Ffarrabas.

In 2014, the C.X. Silver Gallery in Brattleboro presented the 50-year retrospective Nye Ffarrabas: A Walk on the Inside. The exhibition catalogue highlights works such as “Egg/Time Event” (1966), an egg encased in a plaster cube, and “Tempus Fluxit” (2013), a clock featuring letters instead of numbers and hands that moved freely over the clock face. 

Fluxus artist and curator Jon Hendricks—who ran Judson Gallery, the nexus of Fluxus activities in New York City in the mid-1960s, and who is the Fluxus consulting curator at the Museum of Modern Art—wrote in the 2014 C.X. Silver Gallery catalogue that “the art world has been asleep for 50 years, dreaming of market amazements and petty talents … what excuse is there to take 50 years to uncover the important body of works of Nye Ffarrabas? Careers have been made on the backs of her pioneering art works.”

Ffarrabas viewed her creative process as anti-capitalist. She drew strength from the human spirit and constantly visualized a world made better through art’s contributions. In The Friday Book of White Noise, a conceptual sketchbook she created beginning in 1962, she defined art as “dangerous, because it threatens the foundations of our assurances … irreverent because it challenges our myths … devious, because it works in us by surprise … sacred, because it can compel us to be honest … subversive, because its insights can cause changes in our lives.”

Ffarrabas has been searching for “Truth” her entire life. It’s a quest that can go on for ages. Truth is often enigmatic and subjective; like art, it is not a finite object. Truth is an action. Truth IS a verb!  

— Mark S. Waskow, President and Founder
Northern New England Museum of Contemporary Art