Willoughby Sharp, at 72; versatile avant-gardist

The performer, producer, writer, and publisher Willoughby Sharp, at a New York City gallery opening in 1967. (Women's Wear Daily)

NEW YORK - Even by conceptual-art standards, Willoughby Sharp's work stood out. There was his gestational spin in a clothes dryer. There was the curious affair of the talcum powder, the teddy bear, and the tab of LSD. And there was the Oklahoma Gun Incident, which members of the art world still discuss, with a mixture of horror and awe, more than 30 years later.

Mr. Sharp, the Ivy League-educated scion of one of New York's most socially prominent families, who in the 1960s and afterward was on the cutting edge of the American avant-garde as a performer, producer, writer, publisher, curator, video artist, and much else, died on Dec. 17 in Manhattan. He was 72 and lived in Brooklyn.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Pamela Seymour Smith Sharp, said.

A central figure in conceptual and performance art back when those forms were new and daring, Mr. Sharp was concerned with making art that was as much for the mind as it was for the eye. Along with artists such as Chris Burden and Nam June Paik, Mr. Sharp helped expand the very idea of what constituted a work of art.

Mr. Sharp was also known as the publisher of Avalanche, a widely respected, handsomely produced art magazine he founded with the writer and filmmaker Liza Bear. Published for just 13 issues between 1970 and 1976, Avalanche featured in-depth interviews with many rising contemporary artists of the day, among them Burden, William Wegman, and Joseph Beuys, the charismatic German artist of whom Mr. Sharp was an early champion.

As a curator, Mr. Sharp attracted international attention with "Earth Art," a 1969 exhibition at Cornell University. Groundbreaking in every sense of the term, the exhibition featured site-specific installations - by Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Hans Haacke, and others - that were hewn, molded or otherwise created from the land. Mr. Sharp also ran the Willoughby Sharp Gallery, on Spring Street in SoHo, from 1988 to 2004.

Mr. Sharp's film and video works are in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1976 he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale.

Willoughby Sharp was born in Manhattan. His family appeared often in the society pages; as the announcement of Mr. Sharp's first marriage in The New York Times pointed out in 1960, he was "a nephew of the dowager Lady Eliott of London and Redheugh, Scotland, widow of Sir Gilbert Eliott, tenth baronet of the Clan of Eliott."

Mr. Sharp's mother, a former Ziegfeld Girl whose marriage to his father had caused a family scandal of no small dimension, was by all accounts a refreshing counterweight.

Mr. Sharp received a bachelor's degree in art history from Brown University in 1957, followed by graduate work at the University of Paris, the University of Lausanne, and Columbia University, where he was a student of the noted art historian Meyer Schapiro.

He later taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York, the University of Rhode Island, and elsewhere.

Mr. Sharp's first marriage, to Renata Hengeler, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Shavon Martin.

Besides his wife, Pamela, Mr. Sharp leaves a daughter from his first marriage, Saskia Sharp of Duesseldorf, Germany, and two grandchildren.