Columbia Center for Oral History Portal > Oral history interview with Alex Hay, 2014Biographical NoteAlex Hay was born in Valrico, Florida. He is an artist who performed with the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s and worked as an assistant to Robert Rauschenberg with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. He participated in Experiments in Art and Technology’s 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, which included his dance Grass Field (1966), performed by Hay, Steve Paxton, and Rauschenberg. In the late 1960s, he left the New York art scene and moved to Arizona. Hay is a practicing artist, living and working in Bisbee, Arizona
Scope and ContentsArtist Alex Hay describes his early involvement with Robert Rauschenberg through their dance collaborations with Merce Cunningham. He describes the group's collaborations at Judson Memorial Church and their social scene, which centered at Rauschenberg's loft at 381 Lafayette. He tells stories from travels with Rauschenberg for performances, including the Merce Cunningham world tour in 1964, and travel to Montreal for the World's Fair in 1967. Hay continued painting while making performance art, and describes his piece for 9 Evenings in some depth, as well as other performances and exhibitions of his visual art throughout the 1960s. Hay describes leaving New York and settling in Bisbee, Arizona, where he stewarded the renovation of the Philadelphia Hotel, and continued his visual art practice. He shares some memories from visiting Rauschenberg in Captiva in the early 1970s. He reflects on what qualities are present in the many artists he has known, including Rauschenberg, and what he sees in himself. He describes his current artistic process, and how he negotiates the concept of time, reflecting on time, and place, over the course of his life and in his work, thematically and materially. He shares his reflections on closure, in his relationship with Robert Rauschenberg, in life, and in art
SubjectsAccess ConditionsCopyright by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, 2014
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