Dennis Oppenheim (1938–2011) was born in Electric City, Washington, and earned a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1964 and an MFA from Stanford University the following year. A pioneering figure in conceptual, earth, and body art, he came to prominence in the late 1960s with site-specific interventions in the landscape, including Annual Rings (1968), for which he shoveled concentric, tree-ring–like paths into the snow of a frozen waterway straddling the U.S.–Canada border near Fort Kent, Maine, and Clair, New Brunswick. In the 1970s he turned to performance works that tested the limits of the body, among them Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970), in which he lay in the sun for five hours with an open book on his chest, using his own sunburned skin as the work’s surface. He received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. His later career centered on large-scale public sculpture — most notably Device to Root Out Evil (1997), an inverted, steeple-down church-form structure first shown at the 1997 Venice Biennale and later relocated, successively, to Vancouver and Palma de Mallorca. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, which holds twenty-five of his works, acquired beginning in 1983. Oppenheim died in New York City on January 21, 2011.