On May 8, Barbara Moore will be conversing with Max Schumann at NYPL. Meanwhile, you can view a selection of items from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division’s Art & Architecture Collection in a vitrine in the Rose Main Reading Room, just to the right of the door of Room 300 The Art & Architecture Reading Room.

Here is a taste of what you will find there:

Ellsworth Snyder (1931-2005) was primarily a professional pianist and music scholar specializing in the work of John Cage. Expanding his interests from Cage to a wider circle, it was an easy step to Fluxus --the renegade group of Cage and Duchamp-influenced visual artists and musicians that sprang up in the early 1960s -- as well as other avant-gardists of the 1960s and ‘70s. What ties virtually everything in the Snyder Collection together is that each item -- whether actual music scores, conceptual texts, art objects intended for active handling, or announcement flyers, posters and ephemera -- alludes in some way to different aspects of performance.

On the most obvious level are actual announcements, such as the ones created by visual artists Robert Morris and Marian Zazeela for concerts by, respectively, Richard Maxfield and La Monte Young. Morris’s, when folded for mailing, becomes a direct descendent of his minimalist grey sculptures of the period. Zazeela’s gracefully curled lettering and embellishments resemble her more formal drawings.

The next step after getting an announcement is attending the performance, which typically involves having a ticket. Claes Oldenburg’s mimeographed ticket -- one of six variant double-sided designs he made for the Ray Gun Spex at the Judson Gallery and gym (in the church’s basement) in 1960 -- is here accompanied by some truly funny money from the same events.

George Brecht’s book Direction invites one to follow the pointing fingers. And indeed, pages from the unbound edition lined the stairwell leading up to the original Fluxhall at 359 Canal Street, in 1964 and for at least a decade after Fluxus had left.

Albert Fine’s Piece for Fluxorchestra, Giuseppe Chiari’s La Strada, and Mieko Shiomi’s [Events and Games] are typical examples of multi-functional Fluxus publications, initially seen as editioned art objects, then on inspection revealing brief printed text cards, whose conceptual and instructional nature offers inspiration for using them in performance.

Nye Ffarrabas’s Language Box/Box Language, Ben Vautuer’s untitled pack of cards, and the Robert Filliou, Daniel Spoerri, Roland Topor collaboration, Monsters Are Inoffensive, all invite one to shuffle texts or pictures to form different sentences, stories, sequences.