Haacke was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on November 15, 1936. He first studied drawing and painting at Cooper Union in New York City, where he was a student from 1955 to 1957. He continued his art studies at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia from 1957 to 1959, where he specialized in graphic design. After college, Haacke enlisted in the United States Army, where he served as a graphic illustrator from 1959 to 1961.
After his service, Haacke returned to New York City and began working as a freelance commercial designer. In 1962, he had his first solo exhibition at the Tanager Gallery in New York City. Haacke was an early conceptual artist and, in 1963, began a series of conceptual sculpture installations that included everyday objects and manipulated them into new contexts. The 1965–1966 piece Condensation Cube comprised a glass box with a block of ice suspended in the center. Haacke's concept was that the cube would slowly condense, creating water that would form puddles around the base.
Haacke expanded his installations to include a greater variety of found and manufactured materials, as well as photographic and video documentation of his working processes. In 1969, he collaborated with Hans Haacke on the piece Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, an installation that used real estate listings from the New York Times to examine real estate ownership patterns in Manhattan. The piece was installed in the Jewish Museum in New York City, where it was controversial due to its implied critique of the concentration of real estate ownership among wealthy individuals and institutions.
In the early 1970s, Haacke's work became increasingly political. He created several works that examined the relationships between art, the art world, and society, including the 1971 piece MoMA Poll, in which he interviewed visitors to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City about their opinions on the museum and its collection. In 1972, Haacke created the piece Sol LeWitt: Sentences on Conceptual Art, which consisted of a series of text panels that reproduced an interview Haacke had conducted with the artist Sol LeWitt.
Haacke's work has continued to be political, and he has continued to examine issues of social and political power, consumerism, and environmental destruction. In recent years, he has created works that explore the relationships between art, science, and technology, as well as the use of surveillance technologies in society.
Haacke's work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums around the world, and he has received numerous awards and honors for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972, a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1976, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1985. He is considered to be one of the most important conceptual artists of his generation.