Kaprow, Allan (1927- ), American performance artist and art theorist, the inventor in the late 1950s of an artistic event known as a happening. This loosely defined form of art could encompass almost any activity. In the early 1960s Kaprow defined the happening as "an assemblage of events performed or perceived in more than one time and place. Its material environments may be constructed, taken over directly from what is available, or altered slightly, just as its activities may be invented or commonplace." The happening marked the beginning of an important new art movement known as performance art.

Kaprow drew the inspiration for the happening from a variety of sources. Reading Art as Experience (1934), in which American philosopher John Dewey sets forth his ideas about the experiential nature of art, led Kaprow to embark upon a celebration of the importance and meaning of everyday activities and experiences. American experimental musician and composer John Cage, with whom Kaprow studied from 1956 to 1958, introduced him to the idea of using randomness or accident in creating art. Another source of inspiration was American painter Jackson Pollock, whose physically active painting method focused attention on the process of painting as an artistic event.

Kaprow’s first happening, entitled 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, took place in 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in New York City. It involved simultaneous performances by a number of artists who painted, played music, squeezed an orange, or engaged in other loosely scripted activities in 18 compartmentalized rooms, while spectators moved between the rooms at fixed intervals. Most of Kaprow’s happenings were enacted in a setting not traditionally associated with art or theater, such as a warehouse, parking lot, or grocery store. With his happenings, Kaprow attempted to erase the boundary between performers and audience and to blur the lines between life and art. As each event was considered unique, there were no rehearsals, although Kaprow provided a loose script, specifying materials, times, places, and actions to be performed. In his work Household (1964, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York), participants licked jam off the hood of a car parked in an open field.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Kaprow also created environments, large sculptures that the viewer entered into rather than looked at from the outside. Created as temporary works, environments employed everyday materials and objects and could encompass sights, sounds, smells, and textures. For example, Yard (1960, New York City) included hundreds of used tires piled up in a Manhattan backyard. The environments that Kaprow and other artists created provided a starting point for what later became known as installation art.

In the 1970s Kaprow’s events became more intimate and private, involving fewer participants and focusing on interpersonal relationships. As in the earlier projects, there was no audience separate from the participants, and the participants’ discussions after the event became part of the piece. In the 1980s and 1990s Kaprow’s work focused increasingly on how television and computer technologies affect everyday life. He also attempted to reinvent some of his earlier works in order to explore how daily life and culture had changed since the events were first performed and to investigate personal issues of memory and aging.

Allan Kaprow was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and spent his childhood in Tucson, Arizona. He later moved to New York City, where he studied painting at the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts from 1947 to 1950 and earned a B.A. degree from New York University in 1949. He studied with art historian Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University from 1950 to 1952 and then with John Cage at the New School for Social Research. In 1969 Kaprow helped found the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia; he served as an associate dean there until 1974. He taught art at the University of California at San Diego from 1974 to 1993. Kaprow’s writings include Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (1993).