American artist Charlotte Moorman came to The Juilliard School in New York to complete postgraduate work as a classical concert hall cellist, but was quickly drawn into the world of avant-garde performance. She founded the New York Avant Garde Festival (1963–80) and influenced countless artists, composers and musicians, including her friend and one-time roommate, Yoko Ono. Moorman became a fixture of international experimental art circles, primarily Fluxus, working closely with artists such as John Cage, Carolee Schneemann and, most famously, Nam June Paik.

After first meeting in Germany in the late 1950s, and then again in New York in the mid-1960s, Piene and Moorman developed a lifelong friendship and artistic collaboration that pushed at limits that neither artist could have surpassed on their own.

In 1982, Piene invited Moorman to perform SKY KISS as part of the Sky Art Conference in Linz, Austria. This piece was written for Moorman by the avant-garde artist and composer Jim McWilliams in the late 1960s and was performed on three continents. Elevating the cellist meters above the ground, attached to luminous helium-filled tubular components, allowed Moorman’s improvised musical composition to float down over the audience. All SKY ART events, including SKY KISS, relied on a large community of up to two hundred active participants who worked together to propel Piene’s vision upward. The aspect of collaborative development and execution of his immense air sculptures was as crucial to the work as the final performance itself.

Piene’s experiments with SKY ART had begun decades before his projects with Moorman. On May 22, 1968, on an athletics field at MIT, a team of interdisciplinary collaborators worked to lay out and inflate large polyethylene tubes with helium. The first manifestation of one of Piene’s signature artistic projects, which he called “Light Line Experiment,” rose steadily above the field. The ends of the partially translucent tubular structure were held down by the earth-bound audience, while the soaring curvature of the tubes took on the luminous colors of the infinite sky.

The following year, Piene created what he called Windsocks—forms that take on creature-like qualities as they move organically through the air, carried by gusts of wind.

Piene’s SKY ART evolved further in the 1980s, expanding from inflatable sculpture to “flying architecture.” A prime example was his Berlin Star, a voluminous 15-meter-high star-form object with appendages reaching in every direction like a celestial body.

The architecture of Berlin Star included an interior cave-like structure that played host to Moorman in her collaborations with Piene during several SKY ART events, adding experimental music and live performance to the spectacle overtaking the sky and landscape.

Both Moorman and Piene also collaborated with Paik—one of the Fluxus movement’s key figures—on multiple projects and performances from the 1960s onward. Paik credited his encounter with Piene’s work (specifically his Lichtballett in Cologne in 1957) for his transition to working as a visual artist; and Paik and Moorman, each originally trained as classical musicians, gained renown for their performances that married Moorman’s body and cello-playing skills with Paik’s TV-based sculptural constructions.

Piene invited Paik and Moorman to CAVS as fellows and to give performances in the 1970s and 1980s, recognizing their experiments with music, art and technology to be uniquely suited to the program’s mission.

Paik produced several of his celebrated TV Cello sculptures—three television monitors encased in plexiglass and attached to a cello bridge, mounted to a base—which Moorman would play while live video feed emanated from the screens. These collaborations created enthralling visual and aural feedback loops and expanded the artistic possibilities of sculpture and new media alike.

When the original TV Cello (1971), previously owned by Piene, was accessioned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1992, Paik created a new version of the work—his first ever to use color televisions—gifting it to Piene and his wife, the artist and poet Elizabeth Goldring. As with other TV Cello sculptures, gestures and symbols appear on the surfaces of the transparent boxes in colorful acrylic paint, adding a playful, painterly quality to the objects’ technological components.

Formally reminiscent of the most basic inflatable object—the balloon—orbs also play a recurrent role in Piene's practice. Spherical forms were a fixture in the artist's work from his time with ZERO and appeared across an array of mediums, including in an early collaboration between Paik and Piene for a work conventionally referred to as the Pearl TV (1968).

Another prime example are the shimmering helium balloons in Piene’s Silver Balloon Event (1969), a happening that took place at the inauguration of Boston’s new City Hall. Not only do his spheres catch and reflect light, connecting outward to their environment, they are also reminiscent of natural, generative organisms, including cells, eggs, pearls and flowers.

Over the last five decades, Piene's SKY ART and his inflatable sculptures became a fixture at festivals and exhibitions all over the world, in memorable forms like that of Brussels Flower (1977–78), which alighted from the roof of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1984 as part of the performance event SkyDance/SkyTime.

Piene's largest SKY ART project ever realized is the Olympic Rainbow, which took place at the closing ceremony of the 1972 Munich Olympics and engaged more than two hundred artists, students and enthusiasts on the ground.

Since then, Piene’s SKY ART works have remained a locus of experimentation and collaboration, at once relying on and generating communities each time they take flight.