[1] Montañez Ortiz graduated from Art and Design High School of New York City, and studied at Pratt Institute, where he began as a student of architecture, but later decided instead to become a visual artist, and received his BFA and MFA in 1964.
[2] Ritual, coincidence, duality, transcendence, humanism, performance, gesture, religion and history are some of the subjects that Ortiz has rendered through his works.
[7] In London, 1966, a group of artists like Yoko Ono, Wolf Vostell, Peter Weibel and Al Hansen came together to participate in the first Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) led by Gustav Metzger.
[9] The artists who gathered around this art movement and its development were opposed to the senseless destruction of human life and landscapes engendered by the Vietnam war.
It is the only attempt in the visual arts to grapple seriously with the technology and psycho-dynamics of actual and virtual extinction, one of the few cultural practices to redress the general absence of discussion about destruction in society.
He burned, cut, ripped, gouged, and generally wreaked havoc on domestic objects to bring attention to humanity's vulnerability.
In 1979, after nearly four years of study with psychics, yoga masters and naturopathic healers, Montañez Ortiz invented an inner performance process he named Physio-Psycho-Alchemy.
Its most essential aspect is its sense of reality.” These Physio-Psycho-Alchemy events encouraged participants to lie quietly in various positions as Montañez Ortiz gave instructions to begin the inner visioning process.
Montañez Ortiz's lifelong fascination for technology and avant-garde aesthetics led to his most recent body of two-dimensional works, which he refers to as digital paintings.
He adapts industrial materials and high technology to his concept of painting, creating images that are based on pre-Hispanic designs, Renaissance imagery, historical documents, and diagrams.
[citation needed] Throughout his career, Montañez Ortiz assessed the symbolic meaning of his actions as a destruction artist and his engaged political position.
It was only the beginning of a series of writings in which he would illuminate and develop his ideas about creating an art that was simultaneously avant-garde and politically, historically, and socially engaged.
His warning against aggressive destructive urges is particularly relevant for our times, evoking war, genocide, exploitation and other consequences of human actions.
Rather than evoking hopelessness and dread, however, Montañez Ortiz directs our attention to the link between the history of art, human development, ritual and inner relationships of the mind, body and spirit.