The issues that arise in considering this art are:
a) a commitment to social issue subject matter, and reacting to the rise of Reagan in the 1980s;
b) integrating the all-white artworld through founding multi-ethnic art spaces and programmatic inclusion of graffiti artists;
c) developing strategies of public art, and producing street propaganda for social movements, and imagery around popular struggles
This exhibition includes work from three collections, my parents, my own and a two groups: one called Collaborative Projects and the other ABC No Rio. The collecting began in 1980 and continues to this day, with an emphasis on the last decades and the turn of the 21st century.
Seen all together the work has a clear political trajectory. It starts in the front door of the WPCA with a poster showing the fallen Vendome column in Paris during the Commune of 1871, celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. The image is invoked by a group called the Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC). This was a discussion group, an open assembly meeting in New York City’s Soho art district in the early 1970s to discuss many of the artists’ political concerns, and practical problems that all artists were facing then. (Problems which have not much changed in the intervening nearly 50 years.)
The principal accomplishment of the AMCC was the anti-catalog, a copy of which is sitting here. (It’s a free 90-page PDF online.) This document was prepared to contest the Whitney Museum’s Bicentennial exhibition of the Rockefeller collection of American [sic!] art, a show which included only one African-American and only one woman artist.
The anti-catalog was a critique of the museum institution, and the rich private collector who controlled museums. The book included texts on native American art, African-American art, and art by women, as well as critiques of pervasive class bias in the art world, and critiques of cultural institutions. In terms of US art history, the anti-catalog was a prophetic document. [Wallach, 1998]
The AMCC wrote, “We share the belief that culture should no longer exist merely as an extension of the economic interests or the personal ‘tastes’ of the wealthy and powerful. Nor can we hope to transform culture outside of a struggle to transform the society from which it springs.”
The artists who organized the AMCC came out of an earlier formation, the Art Workers Coalition. Convened in 1969, the AWC was far more directed in its political intentions, primarily contesting the Vietnam War and institutional indifference and collaboration with the war machine. (The same publisher, Primary Information, which produced recent new anti-catalog reissue also published a number of AWC documents as well, available as downloadable PDFs.)
The AWC’s focus on conditions of creative labor has inspired a number of more recent artists groups, like W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition (contesting institutional use of contracted ‘slave’ labor). Antique AWC poster designs reappeared at Occupy Wall Street, which had a substantial proportion of artists involved in its organization.
The First Room
The first room just inside the front door contains work by the artists’ group Colab (Collaborative Projects, Inc.), formed in 1978 and dissolved in 1989. Early Colab members attended AMCC meetings. The group was formed primarily to execute projects together, especially in video and film. I was a member. We incorporated in order to receive state and federal funds then available to artists groups. Like the AWC and the AMCC, Colab was an assembly-based organization, deciding things in open meetings which averaged 30 to 40 artists. Their intentions, however, were not political; they were productive.
Few of these artists had political affiliations, although they shared the general politicization of thinking young people during the Nixon years, and anger and despair at the right wing administration of Ronald Reagan.
Colab artists engaged social issues in their work. Their art was mostly representational, not abstract. The group’s members made films and videos and played music, doing a wide variety of group projects that few of them would continue once they had settled into a specific mode of creative production.
The strongest political line of Colab artists was expressed in the Real Estate Show on January 1, 1980 when a group of us occupied a vacant building owned by the city. We were evicted, but given another city-owned storefront to use. ABC No Rio was started as a cultural center which exists to this day. In 1985, we wrote of it as “a place concerned with the relationship of art and artists to social reality, of artists who try to make work that is not voyeuristic but engaged.”
Another artists’ space allied with Colab where many members worked was Fashion Moda, opened in the South Bronx in 1978 by Stefan Eins. Eins earlier had run a storefront studio at 3 Mercer Street in Soho. He showed and sold artists’ work there, but did not operate like an art dealer (taking a commission, organizing publicity, etc.).
The South Bronx neighborhood where Fashion Moda opened was a desolate area, famous for its many abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and boarded-up storefronts. Fashion Moda opened its doors to a community of people of color which, as it happened, was experiencing a cultural explosion in the form of hip hop. Fashion Moda held the first important show of graffiti art, organized by John “Crash” Matos, the subject of the cast sculpture in this exhibition.
The sculptors John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres’ live casting technique made their art practice a performance, leading both to a career in public art. Other Colab artists also made public art. Most, however, pursued gallery careers in the mainstream art world with greater or lesser success.
Artists from both ABC No Rio and Fashion Moda came together along with innumerable others in the summer 1980 Times Square Show. This show is famous as the public debut of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and included graffiti artists alongside the mostly white artists.
One project of the Colab group was the A More Store, an annual sale of artists’ multiples and small works during the holiday season. This came out of the Times Square Show gift shop. Many artists made small objects to sell cheaply – a cabinet here holds numerous examples of the things artists made to make some money, whether they were well known or not. It was the novelty of the item in its decorative value that was the key to a successful store item.
The front room of the show contains numerous works by artists who worked at ABC No Rio. No Rio also became a subcultural hub and a venue of hardcore punk music. During this later period of the ‘80s and ‘90s, ABC shared personnel with the Rivington School artists, a group which squatted a vacant lot and built a huge junk metal sculpture. Linus Coraggio’s metal frame here encloses a photograph of the “sculpture garden”, and a goofy jagged portrait of “JMB” (Basquiat?) by a painter called FA-Q represents this very male and often drunken band of outsider artists.
Room Two
The next room contains more conventional artistic work, much of it involved with abstraction. This work is by artists who exhibited in the East Village during the “art gallery movement” as it has been called of small mostly artist-run galleries that really kicked off the full-scale gentrification of the Lower East Side. While many of the artists expressed social content in their work, the goal of this movement of short-lived galleries was to expose as many artists as possible during the super-heated rich people’s economy of the Reagan ‘80s.
The west wall of the gallery is hung with works that my parents collected, mainly Mexican and Chicano/a artists from their time in Los Angeles. Some of these pieces are explicitly political, engaging hard experiences of Latinx workers, like Judy Baca’s mural commemorating the mineworkers of Colorado. In the center, above, is a poster “Rompe la Dependencia,” by an early NYC political poster group, the Black Cat Collective. This loose group of anonymous artists produced political posters for the street for decades, starting in the 1970s.
Their work prefigures the more straightforwardly political graphic art and poster groups active in the 21st century, like the Just Seeds cooperative and World War III magazine. A sample of this work is on the next wall, to the south. In the center is a print by Leon Golub, an older artist active with the AWC and AMCC, who took as his subjects racist mobs (this image in particular) and South African mercenary torturers.
The hallway immediately outside contains a sign made for the street by feminist artist Ilona Granet. There is also a sign by the RepoHistory group, a group dedicated to producing public markings of important sites of peoples history. The first work is a poster of “Truisms” by Jenny Holzer, an ambiguous set of inflammatory statements she gleaned from polemics both left and right and posted on NYC streets in the late 1970s.
In conclusion, this collection is a kind of cross-section of some 40 years of art production mostly in NYC which engages political and social themes. Much of the work comes from a period that marked a decisive turn in art in NYC away from the dominance of highly theorized modes of abstract art making to a re-introduction of social and political content. Today much of what these artists were doing has been more broadly developed as a coordinated set of practices which are regularly used to support social movements.
– Alan W. Moore, June 2021
REFERENCES:
the anti-catalog – download of 90-page PDF at: primaryinformation.org/an-anti-catalog/
Art Workers' Coalition - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Workers%27_Coalition
Alan Wallach, “Rereading An Anti-Catalog: Radical Art History and the Decline of the Left,” 1998
unpublished paper online at: primaryinformation.org/an-anti-catalog/
Working Artists and the Greater Economy
wageforwork.com
Gulf Labor Artist Coalition | Who's Building the Guggenheim ...
gulflabour.org
"Occupy Wall Street, which had a substantial proportion of artists involved"
Yates McKee, Strike Art, (Verso Books: London, 2016)
review by Paloma Checa-Gismero
field-journal.com/issue-4/review-yates-mckee-strike-art
Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab), by Alan Moore & Marc Miller
98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-colab
Stephen Zacks, “Where Can We Be? The Occupation of 123 Delancey Street”, August 2015
placesjournal.org/article/where-can-we-be-123-delancey-street/
Alan Moore and Marc H. Miller, “The ABCs of ABC No Rio And Its Times”, 1985
98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-introduction
Fashion Moda - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_Moda
Allan Schwartzman, Street Art (Dial Press, NY, 1985)
Tiernan Morgan, “35 Years After Fashion Moda, a Bronx Gallery Revisits the Landmark Space”, August 6, 2015
hyperallergic.com/227683/35-years-after-fashion-moda-a-bronx-gallery-revisits-the-landmark-space/
Lawrence, “Interviews – Justseeds (including Swoon & Chris Stain)”, May 4, 2010
arrestedmotion.com/2010/05/interview-justseeds-including-swoon-chris-stain/
Steven Heller, “World War 3 Has Raged for 35 Years”, July 3, 2014
theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/07/world-war-3-the-dawn-of-comic-books-as-protest-art/373878/
Greg Sholette, "REPOhistory'
gregorysholette.com/repohistory/
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For more specific information about this collection and Alan W. Moore’s research, visit alanwmoore.net (under construction)
