Prominent CCA alumnus Dennis Oppenheim (Painting 1965) died of liver cancer on January 22. He was 72. A pioneer of Land art, conceptual art, performance art, and video in the 1960s and 1970s, Oppenheim moved fluidly throughout his career from the macrocosm of the landscape to the microcosm of the body.

He received a BFA from CCA and an MFA from Stanford University, both in 1965. He moved to New York in the late 1960s and lived there for the rest of his life. He presented numerous solo exhibitions over the course of his career at such prestigious venues as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Museo de Arte Alvar y Carmen T. de Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He received many awards and honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2007 he was recognized for his lifetime achievement at the Vancouver Sculpture Biennial.

In the last two decades Oppenheim concentrated on creating large-scale public artworks that combined aspects of architecture and sculpture. Some of these works proved problematic, for instance Device to Root Out Evil, a church turned upside down, originally presented at the 1997 Venice Biennale. It was difficult to find a permanent home for the piece; it was deemed too controversial for locations in New York and Stanford, then it was installed for a time in a Vancouver park before being moved again because it blocked views. Oppenheim’s notoriety did not prevent him from receiving major commissions, however. His subsequent works included two large-scale installation pieces for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Local audiences may remember his landmark installation Recall (1974), which appeared in CCA’s centennial exhibition Artists of Invention: A Century of CCA at the Oakland Museum of California in 2007. The piece included a soundtrack by the artist in which he shared personal memories, including recollections of attending classes at CCA. Oppenheim was a lively and engaging presence at the opening reception.

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Read the New York Times obituary by Roberta Smith