Born in Leningrad, Russia, and raised in Riga, Latvia, Boris Lurie was taken prisoner by the Nazis at the age of sixteen and imprisoned for four years in a series of labor and concentration camps, including the Riga Ghetto, Buchwald and Stutthof. Lurie's mother, sister, grandmother, and teenage girlfriend were shot by Nazi Einsatzgruppe A with the help of local collaborators in the Rumbula forests on the outskirts of Riga in December 1941.
After his liberation, Lurie remained in Germany for a year and worked for the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. Lurie and his father moved to New York City in 1946 and the younger Lurie began his career as an artist.
Lurie first gained national attention in 1959, when along with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, he founded the NO!art movement, based out of the cooperative March Gallery on East 10th Street, then later uptown at Gallery: Gertrude Stein. The group gained notoriety with exhibitions entitled Doom, Involvement, and Vulgar, which dealt with a range of subjects including war, genocide, violence, racism, nuclear proliferation, consumerism, pornography, and the emerging art economy. The principle aim of NO!art was for total unabashed self-expression in art leading to social involvement. Thus it stood in opposition to the two emerging commercial movements of the era, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.
For the most part critics and curators of the day rejected Lurie and NO!art. As he stated, "The art market is nothing but a racket. There is an established pyramid which everybody who wants to benefit from it has to participate-if he is permitted to participate." Yet Lurie continued to produce his highly charged political and social imagery.
Lurie would go on to additionally devote his efforts to writing, working until 1987 to publish, in collaboration with Seymour Krim, a collection of essays by himself and other NO!artists, titled NO!art: Pin-Ups, Excrement, Protest, Jew-Art. He also penned his memoirs, In Riga, which he began working on following his first return visit to Latvia in 1975, and the novel House of Anita, both published posthumously.
He died in 2008 in New York. Boris Lurie is buried in Hof Hacarmel cemetery in Haifa, Israel.