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Welcome to the Kaprow Site

Allan Kaprow, Household, women licking jam off of a car, 1964. Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA (980063)

Happenings, a term coined by Allan Kaprow in the late 1950s, define an art form in which an action is extracted from the environment, replacing the traditional art object with a performative gesture rooted in the movements of everyday life. Thanks to a generous grant from the Getty Foundation, MOCA has invited Los Angeles-area art schools, academic institutions, arts organizations, museums, and artist-run spaces to reinvent a diverse selection of Kaprow’s Happenings.

This website provides a comprehensive calendar of Happenings being reinvented by 29 local institutions throughout Southern California. Click on a Happening title for a description of how it will be reinvented, to learn where and when it will take place, and to read a historical note on how Allan Kaprow originally performed each Happening.

This website is also a living archive. After reinventions take place, participants will upload photo and video documentation. Visitors are then encouraged to leave comments, building upon the dynamic relationship between interaction and interpretation embodied in Allan Kaprow’s work.

the Happenings listed on this website are FREE unless otherwise noted. Please consult the schedule to see which institutions invite audience participation, spectators only, or are closed to the public. In all cases, interested participants or spectators are encouraged to contact the organizing institutions for more detailed information or questions about the events.

Allan Kaprow, Household, women licking jam off of a car, 1964. Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA (980063)

rena small 03.21.08 / 12pm

Allan told me I had the gold nugget. This was in a conversation in his teaching office at Cal Arts when I wa a young art student of his
I’ll never forget our first assignment in his Happening class,
we were all given a sheet of directions, which in detail, directed us to go outside the classroom, across the highway and into the fields and sit, alone, and lick our arm, and watch the spit dry,
and it was a great moment in my life
try it sometime

i think he left the earth too soon though that is a happening too

rena small 03.21.08 / 1pm

Though I did not participate directly in “An Allan Kaprow Happening” I fit into a criteria upon reflection of my knowing Allan Kaprow–being one of the few lucky art students to attend his “Happenings” classes at Cal Arts in 1974-76 and to participate in several memorable group happenings..

He was gentle, direct, thorough, without being dogmatic. He left doors open in every exercise for me/us to explore to set up the structure within his structure to feel what a happening was and could be and might be and might not be:

I fondly remember our first class assignment, or one of the first:
Allan dutifully, like any teacher, passed out a xeroxed sheet of specified directions numbered 1-10 for example:
The one direction and action I’ll never forget that is burned into my memory deeply went something like this: Find a place, secluded, alone, preferably in nature, away from the context of the classroom. Sit quietly and carefully …lick your forearm and….watch your saliva to dry.

Consult with another classmate and compare, for example your experiences, how long each of your saliva took to dry.

I can still feel the heightened sense of time I discovered by doing this, the length of time of what I had considered before doing this– as a waiting time had transformed into another set of codes–this was happening time.

I use this as a part of my art process, deliberately. The skill of Happenings that I learned and practiced under Allan’s teaching eye gave me the opportunity as an artist to define what it is an artist is actually doing when they are in the process of making the art. The time. That time was an exceptional time. Try it today. Try it now. If you can’t get into the natural landscape, do it right where you are. Right now. Take the risk.

rena small

Michael Buitron 03.21.08 / 5pm

Great exhibit! I’ve had the opportunity to participate in Easy, Scales, and Burbank out at CalArts, and will be a part of Publicity on May 4. The show captures the spirit of Kaprow’s practice without getting bogged down in historical reenactments.

Welcome to the Kaprow Site

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