Artist and architect Vito Acconci died today from a stroke at the age of 77. For a little under two decades, Acconci produced strikingly original and impressionable art, before abandoning it for experimental architecture and design. Later in life, Acconci would say he hated the word “artist.” Last year, in a New York Times profile ahead of his 2016 retrospective at MoMA PS1, he looked back on his performance art years and remarked, “I didn’t really have anything to do with art.”
Acconci was born in 1940 in the Bronx, to an American mother and an Italian father. He resided in New York City most of his life, where he participated in the Downtown Manhattan art scene, founded his own architecture studio in 1988, and taught at both Brooklyn College and Pratt Institute. But before all that, in 1962, he briefly left to pursue an MFA in poetry at the University of Iowa.
