Flavin studied for the priesthood in Brooklyn for a brief period of time before enlisting in the United States Air Force. During military service in 1954–55, Flavin studied art through the University of Maryland Extension Program in Korea. Upon his return to New York in 1956, Flavin briefly attended the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts and studied art under Albert Urban. He later studied art history for a short time at the New School for Social Research, then moved on to Columbia University, where he studied painting and drawing.
From 1959, Flavin was shortly employed as a mailroom clerk at the Guggenheim Museum and later as guard and elevator operator at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, and Robert Ryman. Two years later, he married his first wife Sonja Severdija.
Flavin married his second wife, the artist Tracy Harris, in a ceremony at the Guggenheim Museum, in 1992.
Flavin died in Riverhead, New York. His estate is represented by David Zwirner, New York.
Early work
Flavin’s first works were drawings and paintings that reflected the influence of Abstract Expressionism. In 1959, he began to make assemblages and collages.
In the summer of 1961, while working as a guard at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Flavin started to make sketches for sculptures that incorporated electric lights. The first works to incorporate electric light were his "Icons" series: eight colored shallow, boxlike square constructions made from various materials such as wood, Formica, or Masonite. Constructed by the artist and his then-wife Sonja, the Icons had fluorescent tubes with incandescent and fluorescent bulbs attached to their sides, and sometimes beveled edges. One of these icons was dedicated to Flavin's twin brother David, who died of polio in 1962. "
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One of Flavin's last works was the lighting for a glass-enclosed arcade (1996) at the Wissenschaftspark Rheinelbe (Rhine-Elbe Science Park) in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. The arcade was designed by Uwe Kiessler; it stretches 300 metres (980 ft), and connects nine buildings.
The "Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy (the Diagonal of May 25, 1963)," a yellow fluorescent placed on a wall at a 45-degree angle from the floor and completed in 1963, was Flavin's first mature work; it is dedicated to Constantin Brâncuşi and marks the beginning of Flavin's exclusive use of fluorescent light as a medium. In the decades that followed, he continued to use fluorescent structures to explore color, light and sculptural space, in works that filled gallery interiors. These structures cast both light and an eerily-colored shade, while taking a variety of forms, including "corner pieces", "barriers," and "corridors." Most of Flavin's works were untitled, followed by a dedication in parenthesis to friends, artists, critics and others: the most famous of these include his "Monuments to V. Tatlin," an homage to the Russian constructivist sculptor Vladimir Tatlin, which he continued to work on between 1964 and 1990.
By 1968, Flavin had developed his sculptures into room-size environments of light. That year, he outlined an entire gallery in ultraviolet light at Documenta 4 in Kassel, Germany. Additional sites for his architectural “interventions” became the Grand Central Station in New York (1976), Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (1996), and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas (2000). In 1992, Flavin’s original conception for a 1971 piece was fully realized in a site-specific installation that filled the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's entire rotunda on the occasion of the museum’s reopening. His last artwork was a site-specific work at Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa, Milan, Italy. The 1930s church was designed by Giovanni Muzio. The design for the piece was completed two days before Flavin's death on November 29, 1996. Its installation was completed one year later with the assistance of the Dia Center for the Arts and Fondazione Prada.
The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas states that in 1990 Dominique de Menil approached Flavin to create a permanent, site-specific installation at Richmond Hall. Just two days before his death in November 1996 Flavin completed the design for the space. The artist’s studio completed the work.
