Robert Watts (artist)

He organised the proto-fluxus Yam Festival, May 1963 with George Brecht, and was one of the main protagonists, along with George Maciunas, in turning SoHo, New York, into an artist's quarter. He died Friday September 2, 1988 of lung cancer in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania.

Watts' friendship with Maciunas was cemented when the latter was confined to a hospital bed throughout May 1963. To cheer him up, Watts sent him Hospital Events (see [1]). Maciunas enjoyed the piece so much that he published it as an early Fluxbox; many of Watts' contemporary event cards were subsequently included in Fluxus 1, 1963, Maciunas' first year box compiling works by the members of the international avant-garde.

Watts met the artist and chemist George Brecht in 1957 after the latter saw an exhibition of Watts' work and sought his acquaintance; the two would meet for lunch every week, with Kaprow occasionally joining them, for a number of years to discuss art and to plan joint exhibitions. One of the most famous was the proto-fluxus Yam Festival (1962–3), which used mail-art to build expectations for a month-long series of happenings, performances and exhibitions at Rutgers, New York City and George Segal's farm in New Jersey. Participating artists included Alison Knowles, Ay-O, Al Hansen, Ray Johnson, John Cage, and Dick Higgins. The events ran parallel to George Maciunas' Fluxus Festivals in Europe (Sept 1962-early 1963) -which had already performed some of Watts' event scores in Düsseldorf- and the two events were officially joined when Maciunas published Brecht's event scores as Water Yam, the first of the Flux boxes to be published. Watts' own flux collection, Robert Watts Events was published a year later and brought together many of the mail art event scores that had been used to publicise the Yam Festival.

Watts attended the duPont Manual High School in Louisville and earned a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Louisville in 1944. He then served as an officer in the United States Navy aboard aircraft carriers. Watts left the Navy and moved to New York in 1948, where he studied art at the Art Students League and later at Columbia University from where he gained a degree in the History of Art in 1951, majoring in pre-Columbian and non-Western Art. After becoming Professor of Art at Douglass College, Rutgers University, 1953, he started to exhibit works in a proto-pop style. He participated in Pop Art shows such as New Forms, New Media exhibition in 1960 at Martha Jackson's Gallery; the Popular Image exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Art in 1963; and the 1964 American Supermarket exhibition at New York's Bianchini Gallery, which also featured Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann. After exhibiting at Leo Castelli's Gallery in 1964, Watts turned his back on the gallery system, and concentrated instead on the anti-art of the emerging New York avant-garde centred around George Maciunas.

Robert Marshall Watts (1923-1988) was an American artist best known for his work as a member of the international group of artists Fluxus. Born in Burlington, Iowa June 14, 1923, he became Professor of Art at Douglass College, Rutgers University, New Jersey in 1953, a post he kept until 1984. In the 1950s, he was in close contact with other teachers at Rutgers including Allan Kaprow, Geoffrey Hendricks and Roy Lichtenstein. This has led some critics to claim that pop art and conceptual art began at Rutgers.