Fluxus New York: Walking Through the Art of the Impossible
Hobbies and InterestsTravel Destinations
If you want a genuinely Fluxus-oriented walking tour of New York, the best approach is to treat it less like a museum tour and more like an archaeological expedition through Greenwich Village and SoHo. Fluxus was unusually embedded in apartments, lofts, churches, storefronts, streets, and improvised performance spaces—and many of those places still exist.
The Fluxus New York Walking Tour
Greenwich Village → SoHo → Lower Manhattan
Distance: roughly 3–4 miles, depending on detours
Walking time: about 2½–3 hours, or a full day if you include museums/archives
1. Judson Memorial Church — 55 Washington Square South
Judson Memorial Church
3.8•Church•Closed
Website•Directions•(212) 477-0351
Begin at Judson, on the south side of Washington Square.
This is one of the most important places to understand the downtown experimental-art ecosystem that made Fluxus possible. Beginning in the 1950s, Judson deliberately opened its spaces to artists, providing a relatively uncensored environment for exhibitions, performances and experimentation. Fluxus happenings were subsequently held here, including Some Manipulations in 1969, involving artists such as Nam June Paik and Al Hansen.
Jon Hendricks, later a major Fluxus archivist, worked at Judson and reopened the Judson Gallery in 1966. The church was simultaneously a center for experimental theater and the emerging Judson Dance Theater.
What to look for: the building itself. Imagine the basement and church spaces stripped of their conventional function and filled with performers, musicians, dancers and artists doing things that often looked more like games, rituals or provocations than conventional art.
Fluxus connection: ★★★★★
2. Washington Square Park
Washington Square Park
4.3•City park•Open
Website•Directions
Walk through the park toward MacDougal Street.
The park isn't a single documented Fluxus venue so much as a useful geographic and cultural waypoint. The Village's tradition of street performance, informal music-making, poetry, political activity and artistic experimentation was precisely the kind of environment in which Fluxus thrived.
Think of the park as the transition between institutionalized experimental art at Judson and the increasingly informal, street-level culture of SoHo.
3. 112 Chambers Street — the Yoko Ono / La Monte Young loft
This is the first major detour.
The loft at 112 Chambers Street hosted the extraordinary series of experimental concerts organized by Yoko Ono and La Monte Young between December 1960 and June 1961. MoMA's Fluxus archive preserves programs and documentation for the series, including works by Henry Flynt, La Monte Young and Richard Maxfield.
This predates the formal emergence of Fluxus, which is exactly why it is so important.
Here you are effectively standing at one of the pre-Fluxus pressure points: prolonged tones, experimental composition, performance, audience participation and the collapse of boundaries between music and visual art.
Fluxus connection: ★★★★★
Historical importance: ★★★★★
If you're willing to make this a longer tour, I would absolutely include it.
The SoHo Core
From Chambers Street, head north toward SoHo.
This is where the tour becomes much more intensely Fluxus.
4. 80–82 Wooster Street — the heart of Fluxus
This is the essential stop.
George Maciunas purchased 80–82 Wooster Street and developed it into what became known as Fluxhouse Cooperative II. It became the center of Fluxus activity and one of the foundational artist-owned buildings of SoHo.
Maciunas's larger idea was radical: rather than merely making art in a gallery, artists could take over the physical infrastructure of the city.
The building contained artists' living and working spaces, while the ground floor became associated with Jonas Mekas's Filmmakers' Cinematheque. Later, Anthology Film Archives occupied the location from 1974 to 1979.
This was also the site of numerous Fluxus events, including George's Dumpling Party and the 1977 New Year's Eve Flux Cabaret. Maciunas's funeral took place here in 1978.
The building is particularly fascinating because it connects several otherwise separate histories:
- Fluxus
- artist-run housing
- experimental cinema
- SoHo loft culture
- performance art
- underground publishing
- Yoko Ono and John Lennon
- Andy Warhol
- Jonas Mekas
Maciunas even planted a tree in front of the building in 1967, according to the George Maciunas Foundation.
Fluxus connection: ★★★★★
Do not skip this stop.
5. 16–18 Greene Street
Walk a few minutes east to 16–18 Greene Street.
This was another Maciunas Fluxhouse property. His original plan was extraordinarily ambitious: he envisioned the building as a Flux Amusement Center, potentially containing a Fluxshop, discotheque, games, play areas and other forms of participatory entertainment. The scheme ultimately wasn't realized.
That failure is actually revealing.
Fluxus wasn't simply an art style. Maciunas was trying to create an alternative social infrastructure in which art, housing, entertainment and everyday life became indistinguishable.
Pause here and imagine what the neighborhood looked like in the 1960s. This wasn't the polished SoHo of galleries, boutiques and restaurants. It was a declining industrial district that artists were gradually converting into an enormous experimental laboratory.
Fluxus connection: ★★★★★
6. 80 Wooster → SoHo streets
Now take your time walking the surrounding blocks.
The area bounded roughly by Houston, Lafayette, Canal and West Broadway contains the extraordinary cast-iron architecture that made the loft movement possible. Maciunas exploited these large industrial buildings as spaces for artist cooperatives.
This part of the tour is deliberately unspecific: the neighborhood itself is the artifact.
Look upward at the enormous windows and loft floors.
The Fluxus story here isn't just about performances that happened inside buildings. Maciunas was attempting to transform the ownership structure of the neighborhood.
By the mid-1970s he had been involved in cooperatives encompassing numerous buildings. Artists including Nam June Paik, Jonas Mekas and Ornette Coleman acquired lofts through this network.
In that sense, SoHo is arguably Maciunas's largest Fluxus artwork.
7. 110 Mercer Street — Shigeko Kubota and Nam June Paik
Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation
Arts organization
Website•Directions
This is a particularly interesting contemporary stop.
The Foundation is located at 110 Mercer Street, identified as the historic loft where Shigeko Kubota and Nam June Paik lived and worked. Kubota moved to New York in 1964 at Maciunas's invitation and became deeply involved with Fluxus.
Kubota is especially important because she demonstrates how Fluxus flowed directly into video art, electronic media and installation.
Paik, meanwhile, would become one of the central figures in video art.
Fluxus connection: ★★★★★
Check ahead before treating this as a conventional museum stop; it is primarily an archival/foundation site rather than a normal walk-in attraction.
8. Emily Harvey Foundation — 537 Broadway
The Emily Harvey Foundation
5.0•Arts organization
Website•Directions•(212) 260-7530
This makes a good final SoHo stop.
The Emily Harvey Foundation's New York program explicitly grows out of Fluxus, Concept Art, Mail Art and Performance Art, and its SoHo location continues that tradition through exhibitions, screenings, performances, concerts and discussions.
Emily Harvey herself was an important figure in the international Fluxus network, and the foundation provides a useful bridge between the 1960s Fluxus world and its continuing influence.
Fluxus connection: ★★★★☆
Optional Lower Manhattan Extension
9. 349 West Broadway
This is a fascinating Maciunas-associated address.
Maciunas maintained an apartment here while 80 Wooster became his principal Fluxhouse base. The contrast is worth considering: Maciunas was simultaneously building an entire artist-cooperative system while living within the same neighborhood he was transforming.
It's best treated as an exterior historical marker rather than a destination.
10. End at MoMA — the archival counterpoint
The Museum of Modern Art
4.4•Modern art museum•Open
Website•Directions•(212) 708-9400
Finish the physical walk by going to MoMA another day—or by making it the final destination if you have the energy.
The irony is perfect.
Fluxus was famously hostile to conventional art institutions, yet MoMA now holds the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, one of the major documentary resources for the movement. The archive includes event documentation ranging from the 1960–61 Chambers Street concerts through Fluxus events at 80 Wooster and later Fluxus concerts.
This makes MoMA the archival endpoint of a movement that largely existed to challenge the idea of the museum as the natural home of art.
A More Focused “Pure Fluxus” Version
If you only have half a day, I'd do:
Judson Memorial Church
↓
Washington Square Park
↓
112 Chambers Street(optional subway/taxi detour)
↓
80–82 Wooster Street
↓
16–18 Greene Street
↓
110 Mercer Street
↓
537 Broadway / Emily Harvey Foundation
The 80 Wooster → Greene Street → Mercer Street section is the real heart of the expedition.
What makes this tour different
Don't approach it as a conventional “famous artists' homes” tour. The most interesting thing about Fluxus is that the locations themselves reveal the philosophy.
At Judson, a church becomes an experimental arts center.
At 112 Chambers, an apartment becomes a concert hall.
At 80 Wooster, an industrial building becomes a collective living experiment, cinema, performance venue and Fluxus headquarters.
At Greene Street, a building becomes the proposed nucleus of a Fluxus amusement society.
At Mercer Street, an artist's loft becomes a laboratory for video art.
And throughout SoHo, Maciunas turns real estate itself into an artistic and social medium.
That is probably the most Fluxus way to experience New York: don't just look for where the art was displayed—look for where people tried to change the way art and everyday life were organized.
