John Fekner

Who is John Fekner?

John Fekner is an innovative multidisciplinary artist who created hundreds of environmental and conceptual outdoor works consisting of stenciled words, symbols, dates and icons spray painted in New York, Sweden, Canada, England and Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. A seminal figure in the Street Art movement, Fekner participated in recent urban art exhibitions such as Wooster Collective's 11 Spring Street Project in 2006 and in "Art in the Streets" at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2011. Working with Don Leicht, their project entitled "The Stanley Cup is missing" was part of the annual BLK River street art festival in Vienna, Austria. Art writer Lucy R. Lippard writes, "Fekner does in public what a lot of art world artists don’t even do in galleries: he dispels ambiguity by naming his visions, his viewpoint."

In 1968, Fekner painted the words Itchycoo Park in large white letters on an empty building in Gorman Park, New York. In 1978 he curated the Detective Show at the same outdoor location in Queens which included the words street museum on the invitational card.