I’ve organized an exhibition by the late, great underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez opening February 12th at Andrew Edlin Gallery (212 Bowery, NYC). It’s called Hard-Ass Friday Nite: The Art of Spain Rodriguez. I’ll be there from 3 to 7 pm that day for kibbitzing. On view will be about fifty pages of original art for his classic strips Trashman, Manning, and a few Zap stories, from 1967 to the early 1980s.
Some fun related events include:
On February 24th at 1 pm EST I’ll be Zooming with Spain’s close friends Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
March 27th in the gallery, we will screen Susan Stern’s fantastic documentary on Spain: Bad Attitude, and have a chat afterwards with Kim Deitch and Susan.
In other news, I have a couple of shows up at the Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis: William T. Wiley and the Slant Step: All on the Line and Mary Heilmann: Squaring Davis. Both are on view now until May 8th.
William T. Wiley and the Slant Step: All on the Line: From 1962 to 1969, while teaching at the University of California, Davis, William T. Wiley developed a complex methodology and compound symbol language to explore philosophical, environmental and psychological questions across all available media. The results are startling, often beautiful and always engaging. All on the Line has a special focus on Wiley and his former student Bruce Nauman’s 1965-66 Slant Step project.
Mary Heilmann: Squaring Davis: Mary Heilmann studied with William T. Wiley at UC Davis and found a place whose unique life-as-art ethos meshed with her spirit and allowed the funk to find a home. This exhibition features Heilmann’s Northern California oeuvre of rarely seen ceramics from the mid-1960s, sculptures and a group of “Davis Square” paintings created in 1977.
Coming up:
March 2nd, 6 pm: I’m going to interrogate Nicole Rudick about her beautiful, sad, wondrous new book: What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle (Siglio Press). This is a Leon Levy Center for Biography program that, like things in life, will be on Zoom. Register here.
March 17th: Dewey Crumpler: Painting is An Act of Spiritual Aggression at Derek Eller Gallery, (200 Broome St., NYC).
I’m co-curating this one with Jordan Stein and Sampada Aranke. Over in Berkeley, CA Dewey has been painting the story of intergalactic hooded figures Since his interests in ritual objects, Black culture, and space-time cosmology converged in the 1990s. This exhibition, his first in NYC, will bring these works together with related paintings and collages.
April 8th: Evelyn Statsinger: Tides at Gray, (1018 Madison Ave, 2nd Fl., NYC).
I curated and wrote an essay for this all-killer, no-filler exhibition of the late painter’s enigmatic paintings and drawings. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a Statsinger painting. It gently rocked me. I swayed. You will too.
And lastly, look out for an upcoming essay I wrote on Daniel Hesidence in Artforum’s April issue, and a special Edgar Rice Burroughs surprise coming at you in the pages of Blau sometime this year.