Hard-Ass Friday Nite: The Art of Spain Rodriguez
February 12-April 2, 2022
Curated by Dan Nadel
Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to announce Spain Rodriguez: Working Class Hero, curated by Dan Nadel. This career-spanning retrospective, opening February 12th, will include unique drawings for comics from the 1960s through the 1990s alongside sketchbooks, paintings, and ephemera. Spain Rodriguez (1940-2012), called the “socialist soul” of the 1960s underground comics movement, combined leftist politics, outlaw biker adventure, and science fiction in dynamically drawn stories. He was a natural yarn spinner with an entertainer’s flair for dramatic staging, noir cityscapes, and striking figures. Robert Crumb, who has called Spain a mentor, said recently that “His politics were driven by genuine, authentic class anger, class hatred. It was always clarifying, bracing, to discuss politics, social and cultural issues with him.”
Raised in Buffalo, New York, he attended an art trade school for a few years before working a factory job for the first part of the 1960s. In Buffalo he became a member of the Road Vultures Motorcycle Club, which offered him comradery and decades of material for his comics. Two of these autobiographical comic book epics, originally published in Zap Comix, will be exhibited in their entirety, as well as a painting made in honor of the club. Spain moved to New York’s East Village in the mid-1960s and began a run of publishing that interrupted only by his passing. He became a staff cartoonist for the greatest of the underground newspapers, the East Village Other, appearing alongside the likes of Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg. There he introduced the world to Trashman, Agent of the Sixth International, a kind of urban Marxist James Bond, and the corrupt cop Manning. Original drawings from both series will be on view for the first time in decades. Trashman, in all his class-warrior glory, is further represented by individual drawings and complete stories from the 1960s through the 1980s.
In 1969 Spain moved to San Francisco, where he was invited to join Zap Comix by Crumb Crumb. Two intensely detailed “jam” drawings for Zap by Spain, Crumb, Robert Williams, Victor Moscoso, and S. Clay Wilson will be on view. Spain went on to either found or contribute to many of the most important underground comics, including his own Subvert Comics, Insect Fear Comics, and the seminal anthologies Arcade and Weirdo. Rare editions of these comic books, as well as underground newspapers, flyers, sketchbooks, and art from Spain’s personal collection by the likes of Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Willy Mendes, and Johnny Craig, will offer historical and visual context for Spain’s life and work.
Spain Rodriguez is the subject of the documentary Bad Attitude: The Art of Spain Rodriguez, now playing film festivals internationally. https://www.badattitudemovie.com/. He was the subject of a 2012 retrospective at Buffalo State College’s Burchfield Penny Art Center, Spain: Rock Roll Rumbles Rebels & Revolution. His books include Trashman Lives!, My True Story, Cruisin’ with the Hounds, She, and Che: A Graphic Biography. His life and work are the subject of a five-volume set of books edited by Patrick Rosenkranz and published by Fantagraphics Books, three of which have been released thus far: Street Fighting Men, Warrior Women, and My Life & Times.
Video interview with Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb about Spain: