[5] Piene remained closely associated with CAVS and MIT for the rest of his life, and maintained longtime homes in both Groton, Massachusetts and Düsseldorf, Germany.

[6] Piene collaborated with many artists, scientists, and engineers, including "Doc" Edgerton (pioneer of stroboscopy) and astrophysicist Walter Lewin at MIT.

[8] On 17 July 2014, Piene died of a heart attack in a taxi on the way to ready for the opening of his Sky Art event at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Germany.

In 1957, Piene developed the Grid Picture, a type of stencilled painting made from half-tone screens with regularly arranged points in single colors (yellow, silver, white, or gold), for example Pure Energy (1958, New York, MOMA).

Piene created these Rauchbilder ("smoke pictures") as a reference to elemental natural energies and the Fumage of the surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen, whom he dedicated a work after Paalen´s death in 1959.

In his "fire paintings", he lightly burned a layer of solvent on pigmented paper, developing organic forms from the remnants of the resulting soot deposits.

[14] 1967 marked the beginning of Piene's involvement with "Sky Art", a term he coined in 1969 for his use of landscape and cities themselves as the focal point of his work (Source Needed).

[15] He experimented in industrial design in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of the upscale Suomi tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that Piene decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's Studio Linie.

[16] Working as the director of the CAVS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Piene collaborated in the design of the kinetic sculpture performance Centerbeam first exhibited in Kassel, Germany in 1977.

[6] Later mounted on the National Mall in Washington DC, it featured laser-projected images on moving screens of steam, solar-tracked 3-D holograms, a 144-foot (44-metre) water prism, and helium-buoyed sky sculptures.

[17][18] In 2011 Piene exhibited new public artworks as part of the Festival of Art, Science, and Technology (FAST) which concluded a year of MIT150 celebrations of MIT's founding in 1861.

[23] After his death, he was praised by Germany’s minister of culture, Monika Grütters, who said that "many of his highly aesthetic works in public space were also a signal against the inhospitality of our cities".

[8] Sotheby's established a first record for works by Otto Piene when it sold Rauchbild, a 1961 oil and charcoal on canvas from the Lenz-Schoenberg collection, for £223,250 ($329,000) in February 2010.