With "Light Ballet", he debuted at Howard Wise Gallery, New York, in 1966. He represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1967 and 1971, and exhibited at documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1959, 1964 and 1977. In 1985, he exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial. Piene's solo exhibitions include retrospectives at the Kunstmuseum im Ehrenhof, Düsseldorf, in 1996 and at the Prague City Gallery Prague, in 2002, and a show at the Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund in 2008-2009. Recent museum solo shows include the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2011); Museum Für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe (2013); Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (graphic work) (2013); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2014); Langen Foundation, Neuss (2014); and LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster (2015). In 2014, the Guggenheim Museum in New York held an exhibition featuring a survey of the work of the Zero Group, that included many works by Piene. In 2019 the largest solo show to date, "Fire and Light: Otto Piene in Groton, 1983–2014", debuted at the Fitchburg Art Museum near the artist's former home in Groton, Massachusetts. Piene's works are in more than 200 museum and public collections around the world, among them the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Harvard Art Museums, and the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. The University of Maryland, Baltimore County awarded Piene an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 1994. In 1996, he received the Sculpture Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. In 2003, he became the recipient of the Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts in recognition of his artistic and innovative accomplishments. 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". 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.