Last week at a small theater on Princeton’s campus, a happening took place. Led by Geoffrey Hendricks, a cheerful, tall, slim artist in his 80s, it was a joyful event with no words but many smiles and occasional laughter. On stage, students and other volunteers dressed in white filled boxes with helium balloons, while a plant was pushed across the stage and white beach balls were thrown into the audience.

At one point, audience and performers together formed a procession out of the theater, down the path to the lobby of the Princeton University Art Museum. Then they opened the boxes and the balloons rose high, each carrying with it the image of a “Fluxus Saint.” Among the saints: Allan Kaprow, John Lennon, Nam June Paik, and Joseph Beuys – all artists, now passed, who sought to expand what we think of as art.

Geoffrey Hendricks choreographed this recreation of his 1969 happening, “The Sky is the Limit,” as part of New Jersey as Non-Site, a new exhibition focusing on the Fluxus artists and others who made New Jersey an unlikely center of experimental art in the 1950s and ’60s.  State of the Arts meets Hendricks and finds out more in a story airing November 3, 2013.