Roberta Fallon: I’m talking with Richard Torchia about his multifaceted career as a curator and artist in Philadelphia. Thank you for being here, Richard.
So let’s start here…You told me earlier your first job in the arts was in Newark, New Jersey, and you were young, 25? And you are an English major, but you had an interest in art, right?
Richard Torchia: Thank you again for this opportunity. I’m so grateful to have this chance to reflect and recollect with you in this way. You’re incredibly well versed and knowledgeable about art in Philadelphia and an ideal person to be doing this with.
Just to start, I wanted to confirm I was actually 27 at the time that I took that job directing City Without Walls in Newark, what became New Jersey’s longest-running artist-run space, which was founded in 1975. The gallery was on the second floor of a building on Halsey Street, above a shoe store and beneath a floor of artists’ studios. For a short time, the space also managed a color photocopier, Xerox’s 6500, which it rented to artists by the hour when the machine was working. I had used it for my own work, which I had exhibited at City Without Walls a year earlier in a group show. Access to this copier was part of the appeal. During my tenure—I was there only for about 18 months—we lost the lease on this space. Prudential Life Insurance, one of the gallery’s supporters, helped us relocate to a corner storefront in one of the mall-like corridors near the Newark train station, which made it much more accessible.
I had been offered the position, in part, because its director, who had been planning to depart, had witnessed the work I’d done helping to present a memorial exhibition for a friend and formative mentor, Betty Ruth Curtiss (1931-1985), who had been a member of the collective. Together with her daughter Lisa, and another artist friend, Richard Kapolka, we organized a survey of Betty Ruth’s work that had been proposed by the gallery.
Betty Ruth’s practice was grounded in found objects and immediate processes, including rubber stamping, mail art, and xerography, which she had initially employed as a way to document the necklaces she made. It was Betty Ruth who, in 1981, introduced me to the art and writing of Pati Hill, whose archive was transferred to Arcadia in 2017. In her backyard she maintained a set of instruments she’d produced from street finds. Among them was a xylophone she had constructed from pieces of wood of various lengths resting on parallel rows of bicycle inner-tubes, which allowed them to resonate surprisingly well, as anyone with the curiosity to play would discover. She also cultivated a number of small collections, including chewed gum and found combs, as well as lost gloves, which she presented on a wooden card rack on the family’s front porch in Princeton where neighbors might find or deposit them.
She also collected laundry lint from her own dryer, which had a circular lint screen. A stack of about 300 of these was included in the show along with examples of her work in other mediums, which a year later was presented at Franklin Furnace in New York, the venue founded by Martha Wilson, who encouraged Lisa and I to produce a catalog for the show on the venue’s black and white copier.
The offer to direct the gallery came as a surprise to me as I had no experience whatsoever as an administrator or grant writer.
Roberta: But you accepted the position?
Richard: Yes. Partly because I thought it might be a way to consolidate my interests, which had something to do with being confused about what to do with my BA in English. I had naively thought that English majors became writers. I knew there were careers in academia, and had flirted with the idea of going to graduate school, but I was also impatient to get to work doing something that mattered to me. I never thought of myself as a scholar but was looking for a subject, which became what artists were doing with photocopiers.
I had attended Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and chose to study abroad my junior year, a process administered – as it just so happened – by Beaver College (which became Arcadia University in 2001). Only later did I learn that the school had a reputation for its study abroad program. I ended up at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, where its Sainsbury Center had just opened with a building designed by Norman Foster that resembled an airplane hangar. The Sainsbury Center proved to be a handy introduction to Modernism and helped pave the way for an epiphany I had when, during the winter break, I traveled to Italy and France for the first time. In Paris, I visited the Pompidou Center, which had opened the year before. It was there that I first saw iconic examples of contemporary art, including Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955-59) – the taxidermied angora goat with the tire around its waist – and Paul Thek’s “dead hippie,” (The Tomb, 1967). Nothing I’d seen at the Sainsbury Center – even the Giacomettis or the Francis Bacons – could have prepared me for this kind of art, which I had no tools to apprehend. The need to figure out a way to think about this stuff flipped a switch that I’ve never been able to turn off.
Roberta: You had to go to Europe to connect with American contemporary art. That’s ironic. What happened when you got back to America?
Richard: That is ironic. I also find it telling that you should notice this because that kind of art historical concern would not have been on my radar. For me, it was more about the radical presence of these works. When I returned to Holy Cross the following year, I audited an art history class. And perhaps because I wasn’t being graded, I enjoyed the assignments, one of which was to write short descriptions of in-person encounters with artworks. I had the chance to visit MoMA and chose to write about one of Ad Reinhardt’s black squares that was on view. The way its cruciform composition became more visible as I looked at it was a revelation. This was a perceptual, phenomenological experience that did not seem to require any specialized knowledge and which I enjoyed describing.
And as much as I’ve come to appreciate the way looking at good art can make language useless, I started to see the value of attaching words to this experience and how the effort could activate a reciprocal loop in which writing became a way to think, which encouraged better seeing. In very basic terms, it’s not unlike the transformation that happens when the color brown becomes more intriguing or vivid when it’s referred to as “chestnut.” Eventually I came across Robert Filliou’s statement, “Art is what makes life more interesting than art,” which I think captures and expands this process better than anything I know.
Roberta: For an English major to say “looking at good art can make language useless” is quite interesting to me! Can you elaborate a little?
Richard: I guess that’s one way to refer to the speechlessness of awe. Language put to the service of analysis and interpretation had a gripping effect on me, especially as I had entered college as a pre-med student and struggled painfully with chemistry and math classes. It wasn’t until the spring of my senior year—when some friends who were taking art classes showed me what they were doing with a photocopier—that things started to fall in place. I was fascinated by what I saw my friends doing with the machine and wanted to learn more about the creative applications of xerography, research that introduced me to the need for a publication about the topic. This was 1980. Xerox’s Color 6500 copier had been released in 1973 and was being used by artists, zine producers, as well as graphic designers. The cover of Television’s 1977 album “Marquee Moon” is one memorable example. I wouldn’t know about Seth Siegelaub’s “Xerox Book” (1968) until a few years later. Nonetheless, I started to think about publishing a magazine about “copy art” and began talking to people about it, reaching out mostly on the phone and via letters. I also started to experiment with the machine myself.
After I graduated from Holy Cross I returned home to Toledo, Ohio for an internship at Bowling Green State University in its publications department. I was given my own office next to the department’s photocopier, which I used when I could. Later that year I started a second internship in the publications office at the Toledo Museum of Art. Have you ever been to Toledo?
Roberta: I’ve been through Toledo on the way to Ann Arbor and visited its Glass Pavilion.
Richard: Toledo, as you may know, is called the “Glass City.” It supplies Detroit with the windshields it needs.
Roberta: Oh, wow. I did not know that.
Richard: As part of my internship at the museum, I had the opportunity to write short exhibition reviews for a regional art magazine called Dialogue. The process required that I type the text and layout the page. A lot of these activities, however improvised and crudely done, were exactly what I would do later at Moore College as well as Arcadia—and certainly at City without Walls.
Roberta: Your work with books, copy machines, and language is a long thread going through your career.
Richard: One of the first shows that I worked on at City without Walls was a landscape exhibition guest-curated by Leah Durner, a painter and writer who had recently received her M.F.A. from Rutgers University. It was a group show called Real Property that explored landscape as a commodity. Using a copier, we produced an illustrated catalog that included a text by Leah, which we distributed to critics. The show ended up getting reviewed in Artforum, which was surprising, in part, because it was a group exhibition, which art magazines tend to shy away from. The first sentence of the review opened with a reference to the catalog. It may have helped that the show included Dennis Oppenheim, Christo, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Walter de Maria.
Roberta: Oh my, the “Earth Room” artist.
Richard: Yeah. Along with gallery members and lesser-known artists, an approach that was important to Leah and one that I have tried to apply whenever possible since. It was a revelation to see how an artist-run space in Newark could be seen and heard like that.
Roberta: So, a Xerox-printed catalog caught the eye of the Artforum. I believe you mentioned a show in Princeton you were involved in? And that it had to do with art made by artists using copiers? Can you talk a little about that?
Richard: Before I moved to Hoboken, where I lived when I was working at City Without Walls, I lived in Princeton. My best friend from high school, Kevin Lippert (1959-2022), was a graduate student in the school of architecture there. In the summer of 1981 he encouraged me to rent a room in the house near campus that he shared with other students, the back porch of which eventually became the first office of Princeton Architectural Press, which he founded while he was still a student. Of course, witnessing the inception of a successful imprint first hand—and sometimes assisting with the work—had a profound impact on me. I was teaching English as a second language part time, which often took me to New Brunswick, where I had familiarized myself with the studios at Mason Gross School of Art (Rutgers University), where there was also a Xerox 6500 that I was able to use. It was there that I first saw a sheet of paper catch fire in the machine, which was not uncommon.
Kevin managed to learn about an opening in the schedule in a small gallery at the Princeton Art Museum due to a cancellation and encouraged me to pitch an exhibition to one of the curators. By that time I had started to gather information about artists using photocopiers worldwide and developed a proposal for a show under the rubric of “new technology.” I’d never curated before, but my proposal was accepted. The resulting exhibition included Betty Ruth as well as artists I was just learning about, including Philadelphians Suzanne Horvitz, as well as Catherine Jansen and Will Larson, for example, who were living around the corner from Beaver College. Will was teaching photography at Tyler at the time. Are you familiar with him?
Roberta: Yes, I am. I love his work.
Richard: The show included examples of his “Fireflies” (1969–1978), collages made with the fax machines. (In 2001, Arcadia presented a solo show of Larson’s work in video, which he had recently started to explore.) There were also two collage poems made by Gerard Malanga using one of Andy Warhol’s’ “Death and Disaster” source photos. They were from a larger series that Malanga made on a Thermofax machine that Warhol had at the Factory. Produced by 3M in the 1950s, the device used heat to transfer images to chemically treated paper. Do you know these works?
Roberta: I’ve heard of Malanga and know Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series. But I didn’t know that the Factory had a Thermofax machine. It makes sense because Warhol did a lot of print-based works.
Richard: The museum purchased one of the Malanga works after the show. I was very lucky to be in the path of things like this, so when the opportunity in Newark popped up, it made sense to say yes.
Roberta: It’s great you had the experience in Princeton. And that you got to put together an exhibit there about an art form you were yourself engaged in and fascinated by. Your experience must have looked great to the Newark collective – plus, you were a curator who knew more than almost anyone else about this experimental genre.
Richard: There were others, but I would say that I had a dense Rolodex. I was still developing my plans for the copier magazine, which I had decided to call “Electrographics.” I had even started soliciting essays and reviews from writers, whom I paid. I also had help from Kevin, other Princeton friends, as well as my sister Mary, who assisted with the final paste-up work. A photocopied sampler of the first issue was available at “Bookworks: 1982,” a three-day, international symposium organized by Sue Horvitz with Nexus at Moore College. This became my first time visiting the school, which I recall had a large outdoor courtyard at its center.
Despite all the energy and goodwill for “Electrographics,” I was not able to come up with the funding I needed to print it, which I was convinced had to be done on an offset press. This was not only disappointing but awkward, as I had to return subscriptions. That said, I learned a great deal and met a lot of people. I continued to organize exhibitions for places like Todd’s Copy Shop on Mott Street in New York and had the chance to teach a class about the copier at Pratt Institute. In the end, despite the failure of the publication, the experience might have been more valuable than going to grad school.
Roberta: You had a great “learn by doing” experience! And I agree that it was more valuable than going to grad school. Talk about Moore College and moving to Philadelphia.
Richard: The job at City Without Walls was very challenging. Despite Prudential’s support, the financial difficulties started to become overwhelming. I learned about an opportunity at Moore College where construction on a new gallery—on the site of the courtyard I just mentioned—dedicated to exhibiting the work of Philadelphia artists, was being completed. Moore’s plan was to hire a curator from outside Philadelphia to help ensure an objective approach for the program that would complement that of the Goldie Paley Gallery, then being directed by Elsa Longhauser. The new space was named for alumna Rochelle Levy and its construction had been funded by the William Penn Foundation.
Roberta: I didn’t know the history of the gallery’s construction. I always wondered why it was down a few steps from the Paley Gallery. It’s great that William Penn funded a gallery dedicated to Philadelphia artists.
Richard: I learned that Elsa was deeply committed to publications and was glad that I’d brought a small selection of the exhibition catalogs I’d produced to the interview.
She offered me the job and I moved to Philadelphia in August of 1987. The city was then gearing up for the Duchamp Centennial that fall. Moore participated in two related exhibitions, which became the initial projects I worked on. The first was Duchampiana, a small exhibition featuring material from the collection of artist Howard Hussey, whom Elsa had invited to present a series of lectures about Duchamp that fall titled “Ocular Oasis.” Howard had been an assistant to Joseph Cornell, who had helped Duchamp assemble deluxe editions of his Boîte-en-valise (Box in a Valise) in the 1940s. I’d had a crush on Cornell, whose work I first learned about in the art history class I had audited. The publication documenting Cornell’s 1980 MoMA retrospective was the first exhibition catalog I’d ever purchased. Howard became a fast friend and an influential mentor and we have remained very close ever since.
Roberta: This is great history, Richard. I was not aware there was a Duchamp Centennial celebration in Philly but it makes a lot of sense, since the PMA has a big and amazing trove of Duchamp’s art. Also, did not know that Joseph Cornell worked briefly for Duchamp. Small world, or maybe not so small.
Richard: The second exhibition was a group show of found-object sculpture titled Objects-Dards, based on one of Duchamp’s bronze casts. Howard came up with the idea of printing the announcement card on a blue shipping tag. You know, the ones you often see with a string though the eyelet at the top. This card became an object itself and may have proved more memorable than anything in the show.
The inaugural exhibition for the Levy Gallery was scheduled to open in January 1988. Its goal would be to manifest the mission of the program, which was to be as diverse and inclusive as possible. What ensued for me was a crash course in Philadelphia art.
Roberta: Wow, you needed to speed date to get familiar with all the artists here.
Richard: Exactly. Elsa facilitated as many introductions as she could. It helped that Nexus had shelves of binders full of slides and that Sande Webster, the Fleisher Art Memorial, and others were so forthcoming and generous, including Don Bohn, who was then editing the New Art Examiner from an office at Moore. I also had the chance to see Momenta’s first exhibition— a large group show at the Cast Iron Building—which provided another valuable perspective on the community and its artist-run spaces.
Roberta: Momenta was an early artist collective in Old City, as I recall.
Richard: Yes. In the late ‘80s it was located at 309 North 3rd Street, where I had the chance to show and guest-curate. Momenta relocated to New York and reopened at a space in Brooklyn in 1995. In 2008, I felt fortunate to bring its exhibition, Air Kissing, a hilarious critique of the artworld, to Arcadia.
It’s humbling for me to think of the legitimate grievances aired by that show, in particular Jennifer Dalton’s carousel of 35mm slides documenting statistics regarding inequities of New York gallery exhibitions. In retrospect, my attempt to gather documentation about Philadelphia artists in 1987 feels guileless. Nevertheless, inspired by the slide registry at White Columns—a resource I had used during my time at City Without Walls—I began to amass a considerable collection of 35mm slides from local artists, which eventually became the Levy Gallery Slide Registry. I believe it served its purpose for many years, but was eventually rendered obsolete by the onset of digital and social media.
Roberta: It’s wonderful to hear about the beginning of the Slide Registry. Libby and I had our art in there and it was a great resource for Philadelphia curators. It must have been helpful for you.
Richard: Months of studio visits and conversations culminated in a five-person show entitled Achromatic Variations. It included large drawings by Steve Talasnik (in charcoal) and Jimmy Mance (in graphite), horizontal wall reliefs by Richard Jordan (carved and polished black marble) and Stephanie Tyiska (layered paper punctured by tacks), and five black, 5-ft. square canvases by Quentin Morris, whose work I had learned about from Julie Courtney. (Quentin’s works on paper became the subject of a solo exhibition at Arcadia in 2023.) Julie was then in her third year as founding director of the Temple Gallery. She was a remarkable resource and her exhibitions there, and since (as an independent curator), remain an inspiration. She also became a generous advocate of my own work. Do you remember the Temple space on Walnut Street?
Roberta: Yes, I think so! But I didn’t know Julie Courtney was the founding director of Temple Gallery.
Richard: Exactly one year later, in January 1989, we presented Scale/Ratio: A work for Two Sites by Kocot and Hatton, for which we partnered with the Jessica Berwind Gallery. The exhibition was driven by the prospect of presenting identical installations in two radically different kinds of spaces, a commercial gallery in a domestic townhouse on Latimer St. and a white cube at an art school. The proposition was exciting to me and I was particularly keen to see the resulting photographs depicting a pair of free-standing paintings facing each other, viewed from the same angle and staged in two contrasting spaces. The precision and rigor required of the artists to make this happen was exceptional.
Roberta: Kocot and Hatton are radical conceptual thinkers and makers. What a great project.
Richard: I then started to focus on what might be called omnibus shows, often large thematic group exhibitions motivated by specific questions and research into the community.
Among these projects was a show called Fieldworks: Collecting as Folklore, an exhibition of vernacular displays of homogenous objects primarily assembled in the home and workplace. The prompt came from another centenary, the 100th anniversary of the Philadelphia Folklore Society, which encouraged local institutions to develop exhibitions addressing folklore. The title referred both to “field research” but also the arrays that result when similar objects are organized for presentation. (At the back of my mind were the formal joys of works by Arman, Allan McCollum, Katharina Fritsch, and Ashley Bickerton, among others.)
I was also interested in how collections of like objects could be linked to narratives of their origin and cultivation, as well as how their presentation could convey stories in the absence of the collectors’ anecdotes, something that happens less readily in the case of heterogeneous collections in which each item requires its own label. A book by Laurie Seniuk called Small Collections, was another impetus, as were the collections of my friend Betty Ruth. A folklorist recommended that I read an essay entitled “Objects and Souvenirs” by Susan Stewart, who gave a talk in the gallery during the run of the exhibition.
Inevitably, some of the collections were assembled by artists, and in a few cases, were artworks, such as Bob Natalini’s “Table of Long Thin Objects,” the smallest of which was a second hand from a wristwatch. Other collections could have been artworks, or perhaps were better than art, such as an entire deck of playing cards composed of examples its maker found on the street, or a display of 231 labeled vials of sand, air, and water gathered from all over the world by the clients of Eddie Simon, a barber in Elkins Park who displayed them in his shop and whose retirement fantasy was to return each sample to its original site. Most were made by non-artists, including 14 baby teeth that had been kept by parents in their role as the “tooth fairy.”
One of the most fascinating, if not controversial, aspects of the show was how we displayed these objects, an effort to which artist Bruce Pollock, our installation technician at the time (and who was included with a collection of 45 four-leaf clovers) made critical contributions. Some viewers questioned if we had aestheticized these items while others accused the show of making a mockery of connoisseurship. In many instances, however, we were simply attempting to reproduce or adapt approaches devised by the collectors themselves. The inclusion of two different collections of cat whiskers and three different button collections, each presented in its own distinct way, helped support this idea.
Roberta: This show seems ahead of its time. And also, perhaps a precursor of Leah Douglas’s collections shows at PHL International.
Richard: I would propose Ingrid Schaffner’s Deep Storage (1998) as a definitive contribution to the subject. I was also heartened that Leah included Betty Ruth Curtiss’s stack of lint discs in her show at the airport. I’ve always been slightly envious of those large plexiglas cases that she put to such effective use there. Securing what amounted to the thousands of items that comprised Fieldworks in the public space of the Levy Gallery required a lot of vitrines and a great deal of ingenuity. Bruce’s solutions for presenting Ted Newbold’s collection of 45 walking sticks and Robert Morrison’s 340 key fobs, which allowed them to be handled but not taken, were especially clever.
It was important to feature examples of standard collectibles, such as coins, stamps, and matchbooks (for which word “phillumenist” was coined), along with unexpected hybrid objects, such as pin cushions in the form of miniature women’s shoes. It also included objects united by their use or provenance, such as the six trays of swallowed objects removed from the throats of patients by Dr. Chevalier Jackson that we were able to borrow from the Mutter Museum. Tom Gartside loaned us his collections of mangled pennies, and pencils that had become too short to use.
Roberta: I love that collection of pencils that are too short to use. How many collections in all did you gather?
Richard: There were about seventy in all, solicited through classified ads in the newspapers and local weeklies, as well as word of mouth. In the end, we considered twice as many and could have actually generated a second iteration of the show.
Roberta: Seventy is a lot. More than that boggles the mind. How did you pare it down?
Richard: Establishing the criteria for inclusion was fun but also painstaking because the parameters were so variable. The show included only two “complete” collections, a set of “Judge Dredd” comic books and one including every baseball card depicting Phillies pitcher Steve Bedrosian. The finite closure of these examples made the openness of the others—especially in terms of the number of items in relation to their scale and “scarcity”—another consideration. Choice of subject was also a critical factor. I couldn’t resist Greg Kiersz’s collection of barbed wire or Betsy Brandt’s bride and groom statuettes, some of which still had flakes of icing on their bases. There were two that perhaps only an editor could love but that many people found amusing, such as Bette Alburger’s 60 envelopes documenting misspellings of her surname on their addresses and Sidney Steiger’s 36 photographs of typos on commercial signage.
Having sourced the contents from within the community helped bring people into the gallery that might not ordinarily visit. On the last day of the show, more than 200 visitors left their names in the sign-in book.
Roberta: A very popular exhibit! I guess having so many people’s collections would bring in a bunch of their friends, as well as the curious.
Richard: In another through line for this conversation, many of the themes integral to Fieldworks—including domestic and workplace collections as analogs to those in public museums—relate directly to Scott Kip’s recent installation at Arcadia: objects as potent tokens of experience, the effort required to maintain such accumulations, and how their presentation can impact interpretation.
Roberta: Scott Kip’s piece, which was only a couple months ago, was definitely in conversation with your Fieldworks show.
Richard: The grouping of ostensibly similar objects became integral to another group exhibition in 1992, this time inspired by black and white photographs documenting the studios of Piet Mondrian that depicted dozens of rectangles and squares of painted cardboard mounted on their white walls. The first thought I had upon seeing these photos was imagining each of these pieces of cardboard as a monochrome canvas by a different artist. I started to research such an exhibition and was impressed by the number of examples I found in Philadelphia. My studio visits led me to the essay “Works of Art and Mere Real Things” by Arthur Danto, which uses the hypothetical scenario of nine identical red paintings to argue that an artwork’s meaning is contingent on the external conditions of the “artworld,” including intention and context, as opposed to its material properties. Danto agreed to lecture at the opening and commented about the exhibition in his book After the End of Art (1998).
There were other exhibitions of this kind, including a show that mixed the juvenilia of adult Philadelphia artists—including Thomas Eakins, Cecilia Beaux, Maxfield Parrish, and Alice Neel, who lived here for a while—with that of contemporary children. Artist Bill Scott was incredibly helpful with the research, recommendations, and contacts. The Fleisher Art Memorial and Moonstone assisted with sourcing examples from contemporary children.
One of the primary intentions of the show was to explore assumptions about talent and potential. To do this we established a continuum that started with a wall hung with work made by toddlers and kids of pre-school age and ended with a wall of examples by those in their late teens, irrespective of whether the examples came from contemporary children or those that had become adult artists. The exhibition demonstrated how the freedom of childhood work, which is based more on imagining than seeing, becomes compromised by the challenges of realism. I revisited this theme for a show called “Very Early Pictures,” this time employing the work of international artists that opened at the Luckman Gallery (California State University, Los Angeles) in 2005 with support from Director Julie Joyce, before it traveled to Arcadia later that year.
Roberta: A child’s art before self-consciousness rears up is a wonder. What else are you thinking of?
Richard: I’m also thinking of an installation by Stacy Levy (“Seeing the Path of the Wind,” 1991). Stacy installed an anemometer on the top of the building to translate the direction of the wind outside to a wide ring of eight fans in the gallery directed at a field of hundreds of colored organza flags corresponding to the form of a windrose. A natural phenomenon occurring outside in real time was formalized by its presentation inside the white cube. (This project’s connection with my own exploration of the camera obscura is more clear to me now.)
Roberta: The Levy Gallery, of course, sits beside the Goldie Paley Gallery. Did you coordinate programs or was that not needed…or wanted?
Richard: The dynamic between the two programs proved to be productive. For example, Fieldworks was on view at the same time that a solo exhibition for the outsider artist, Bill Traylor was being presented in the Paley Gallery. Seeing Traylor’s resourceful use of cardboard provided the impetus for a group show in the Levy Gallery called Found Ground, which was an exhibition of drawings and paintings on readymade surfaces. There were many other examples of this kind of reciprocal synergy. Elsa’s expertise in outsider art, for example, made my proposal for the exhibition of children’s work feel like a good fit.
Roberta: Talk about working with Elsa Longhauser, who was a Philadelphia legend, bringing in all kinds of eye-opening international work to Moore.
Richard: Elsa was an outstanding mentor. In addition to encouraging me, she taught by example. She had a great eye both for art and for installation as well as an ear that was embedded in an international conversation about contemporary art. In 1988 she brought the first exhibition for Swiss outsider Adolf Wölfli to the United States. Every summer, she would come back from traveling in Europe with dozens of monographs and exhibition catalogs to share. The review panels she gathered for her “Moore International” series gave me a chance to be in the same room with a roster of leading curators in Europe and the US. I think my enthusiasm for so many of the artists she became interested in, especially people like Adrian Piper, Ray Johnson, Hanne Darboven, Dan Graham, and Jo Baer, among others, made me an instrumental ally.
Roberta: Richard, this is a great introduction to the connections in your life and in the art world that tell your story but also tell a bigger story about the art world. Lots of themes coming together. Do you want to talk about funding?
Richard: Grant writing often has a lot to do with this. Funding can incentivize curating, and exhibitions often exist on paper first. One of the many things I learned from Elsa in this regard was the value of exhibition titles and how, especially in terms of drafting a proposal, it helps to find a title that immediately projects an image and helps give audiences some idea of what to expect. This is especially the case with group exhibitions, which don’t generally name the participating artists.
Another theme here is the exhibition as a medium, which I have found useful as a way to think about my own preoccupations. (For example, I’ve never really had a studio practice, and in general, have only been able to make work in response to invitations to exhibit.) When we had to rename the program at Arcadia about ten years ago as a result of three additional galleries we were asked to program on campus, we landed on “Arcadia Exhibitions” as a way to emphasize this.
I’m motivated by the surprising scope of conditions that can define an exhibition, not only how its contents relate to the given container, be it a gallery or other site, but also any accompanying publication, announcement card or text, along with any public programming. Minor, ephemeral elements can become critical, even the punctuation in an exhibition title. I find this volatility exciting. And, maybe this says something about my own practice as an artist, which is more experiential than material.
I like real things, but I’m not that comfortable making them. I tend to agree with Douglas Heubler. We have enough objects in the world. What we need are constructive ways of experiencing and thinking about them. My projections, or the glass grinding kaleidoscope I realized a few years ago at Wheaton with a lot of help, leave very few physical traces aside from documentation. I have consciously avoided transforming such records into material pictures, in part, as a way to prioritize the perceptual experiences these often performative works provide, especially those involving light, motion, and gravity.
Roberta: There are those that say that curating is an art practice, and the way you’ve been working sounds like an art practice where you’re fighting over the commas or the colons in the title and you’re putting together a program and considering the space and all these other things. That’s more than just what most people think of as an exhibition practice.
Richard: I think that curating is certainly a creative practice but I would never want the process to upstage an artwork or compete with the artist. (Lenka Clayton’s “The True Story of a Stone,” in PAFA’s portion of the recent Rising Sun exhibition, may represent the best example I know of an artwork produced by curating.) I generally believe that curating is closer to editing. As I’ve gotten older and worked with all kinds of artists, I have found that there are those who have no use for curators and others who depend on them. There are all kinds of curators, too. I, for one, have always enjoyed sharing the process with a collaborator, in part, because that person inevitably becomes a surrogate for your audience and generates a conversation that can become more dynamic and discerning. It also helps you avoid the arbitrary.
Roberta: Richard, I love your thoughts about curating and exhibitions. Let’s move on to Arcadia. We’ve been through Newark, NJ, and Moore College. You’ve talked about learning about art and exhibitions and photocopiers, and curating. Now, let’s talk about your work at Arcadia, which is what probably a lot of people in Philadelphia most connect you with.
Richard: I moved to Philadelphia in 1987 and I was at Moore College for 8 years. The last exhibition I organized there opened in the spring of 1995 as part of another citywide festival generated by The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s presentation of John Cage’s “Rolywholyover, A Circus.” Do you remember that?
Roberta: Yeah, I do.
Richard: I had long wanted to do a show with William Anastasi (1933-2023), who became a close friend of Cage’s. Anastasi was born and raised in Philadelphia and attended classes at the Fleisher Art Memorial. The artist Michael Lexier, with whom I was talking about Bill recently, referred to him as “criminally underrated.” I think he is rightly considered an “artist’s artist.” His use of photography, printing, and text as a means to produce installations as well as his investigation of unsighted drawing remain relevant and influential. Thanks to support from the NEA, we were able to present a survey exhibition that was presented in both galleries at Moore. The show was accompanied by a catalog with a cogent and perceptive essay by Eileen Neff that advanced our understanding of his practice and was deeply informed by extensive conversations the three of us had in his studio that I remember fondly.
The exhibition ended my tenure at Moore and helped me into my time as a Pew fellow. I’d never had a grant prior to this, nor a studio practice, so it took me a little time to figure out what to do. I was initially distracted by saying yes to two teaching opportunities.
Roberta: Oh, no! Two jobs during a fellowship – that might just spoil the fellowship.
Richard: Both were leading graduate seminars at PAFA and Tyler. Not having attended art school, I had to catch up on the classics—Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and the like. (One of the highlights of my time at Arcadia was being able to bring Fried to campus in 2008 to talk about the work of Candida Höfer in conjunction with an exhibition of photographs she had taken of iconic, architectural interiors in Philadelphia.) I think the most powerful experiences I had teaching were attending the year-end crits at PAFA, which gave me the chance to witness artists like Osvaldo Romberg argue with Vincent Desidario or learn from Yvonne Jaquette, whose comments to students were some of the most thoughtful, pragmatic, and well observed I’ve ever heard.
Roberta: So here again, you’ve gotten a graduate school program outside of actually going, and actually, you taught the course yourself. Did you get to do any of your own work during the fellowship’s two years?
Richard: Patrick Murphy, then the director of the ICA, had become familiar with my work thanks to a group exhibition he curated there called Conversation Pieces in 1994 that paired three Philadelphia artists with three from the UK. For this show I produced live projections of an hourglass, radiometer, a candle flame and glass of soda water using photocopier lenses. During the first year of the fellowship, Patrick invited me to participate in a large international exhibition in Copenhagen, the “cultural capital of Europe” that year, where I used a telescope lens to produce a camera obscura projection of the pier in one of the 96 twenty-foot long shipping containers that comprised the show. (About five times a day, a live, inverted image of a freighter—framed by the interior walls of the container—entered and departed the projection.) It was also during this exhibition that I met Tacita Dean and saw her work for the first time, a 16mm film titled Girl Stowaway (1994). Our shared interest in lenses, optical phenomena, and solar eclipses initiated a friendship that remains ongoing. (It also set the stage for what eventually became her 35-mm film project “JG,” which Arcadia presented in 2013.)
An opportunity for a solo exhibition at the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson) coincided with a chance to curate a group exhibition at Beaver College, the second iteration of the Closer Look series that director Paula Marincola had initiated in 1995 in rotation with the programmed juried Works on Paper exhibitions. (The Closer Look series provided a chance to curate from a long list of artists whose work had been juried into these annual, and then-biennial exhibitions by Roberta Smith, Rob Storr, Neil Benezra, Bill Arning and the like.) I had also just started working on an installation in one of the corridors at Eastern State Penitentiary, thanks to an invitation from Julie Courtney. It was a very busy time.
Roberta: You were productive during your fellowship, in spite of the two teaching jobs.
Richard: In May of 1997, the last month of my fellowship, I really didn’t know where my next rent check was going to come from. I got a call from Paula Marincola asking me if I wanted to serve as interim director at Beaver for the next season. She was departing the position she’d held since 1988 to direct the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative for Pew. She had already set up the entire program at Beaver for the coming year, so it was easy to say yes.
The first show that fall was a solo exhibition for Donald Moffett, who had been a founding member of Gran Fury, an AIDS activist group (and artistic arm of ACT UP) that had attained international notoriety for its savvy application of advertising and media strategies, in particular its biting use of image and text. You may recall the Creative Time project employing the phrase “Kissing Doesn’t Kill, Greed and Indifference Do.”
After years of working as an activist, Donald had decided to focus on his own practice, which had recently turned toward painting and it was this work that Paula had planned to exhibit.
As soon as he and I started talking in June of that year, before the September opening, he told me that he had changed his mind and he wanted to present an exhibition of color photographs of cloudless blue skies above Manhattan taken at different times of the day. There were to be no texts or overt messaging, which suggested a kind of “truce.” These flat, featureless images, printed in a range of scales, resembled sheets of blank paper, which some visitors at first thought they were. The prints ranged from the darkest indigo—almost black—to pale, powdery tones. Each was presented in a different way, both with and without frames and mats. He installed them at different heights, often relating them directly to the architectural features of the space. On clear bright days, views of the sky from the windows near the gallery ceiling could sometimes be confused with the photos. At the opening we presented Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), the last film Jarman made before his death from AIDS-related complications, among them a form of blindness that restricted his vision to shades of blue.
Roberta: I guess you hit the ground running at Beaver/Arcadia. A show of prints you weren’t expecting…but a monochrome show is something you did at Moore, I believe.
Richard: This was an ideal way to start my time at Beaver. And yes, it helped enormously that I had done that show of monochrome paintings at Moore, which gave me some familiarity with the complex history of this form of abstraction. Because Paula had raised funds for a publication and Donald was an experienced graphic designer, we produced a catalog. The essay was conceived as a series of questions to Donald that he left unanswered. His reticence became an extension of the silence of the work.
As I filled out the program for the remainder of the year, the school conducted a search for the director position. I applied and was hired, never imagining that I’d spend the next 27 years commuting from Fairmount to Glenside. This trip, which became automatic to me, grew to impact my thoughts about the programming, encouraging exhibitions that I hoped would merit the effort the gallery’s constituents would make to travel to the campus.
Among the factors encouraging me to remain at Arcadia were the many attributes of the historic building, constructed in 1894 as a power station with a boiler room, which is why its walls are covered in glazed ceramic bricks. I have always likened it to a chapel thanks to its proportions and the pitch of its 33-ft high roof, which has a way of lending gravitas to any exhibition there. Nor did I ever tire of the way its two ground floor, west-facing windows, which are conspicuous on the building’s stone exterior, disappear once you enter the gallery, where they are masked by sheetrock.
Roberta: That gallery space is a great space and I love that you liken it to a chapel.
Richard: It also has its challenges, like most historic buildings, including the absence of a vestibule. Visitors move directly into the exhibition space from the outside, a condition that has not only complicated loans from lending institutions but allows birds, mostly barn swallows nesting near or on the building, to fly directly into the exhibition space. This has happened on numerous occasions with consequences you might imagine. It also means that unless the weather is cooperating, there is no convenient space directly adjacent to the gallery to offer refreshments.
There is also something refreshingly honest about the dual identity of a proto-modern industrial building adapted to serve as a gallery, which is why Paula has called it a “white cube in drag.” (It was not until Scott Kip’s project that visitors were offered access to the material details above the 12-foot horizon of painted sheet rock, including the exposed steel girders and ceramic ceiling tiles.) The gallery is a cooperative laboratory and whenever possible we did what we could to make the space feel different, or at least less recognizable.
One good example I can mention was Francis Cape’s Utopian Benches (2011), which was an exhibition of twenty wood benches, each an exact replica from a different intentional community in the US, the closest being Ephrata, about an hour from campus. Did you see that show?
Roberta: Yes. I found it quite moving actually.
Richard: Cape asked if we would remove the sheetrock covering the west-facing windows that I just mentioned. Matt Borgen—the gallery installation technician who became Exhibition Coordinator and is now director—saw this as a welcome opportunity to renovate that wall, and we proceeded. During the show, for the first time since what had been a teaching studio became a gallery in 1985, daylight was allowed to enter these two windows. This temporary restoration made the space feel like a meeting house and brought the building closer to the historical period of the benches. The positive impact this change had on people’s feelings about the building made it hard to cover the windows after the show, but of course, we needed the wall space.
There was another show you might remember called Open (2004), co-curated in collaboration with Sandra Firmin, a graduate of Bard College’s curatorial program, who was in residence as an intern in 2002-03, courtesy of Pew, during which we participated in conversations about The Big Nothing, a constellation of city-wide exhibitions exploring themes of nothing and nothingness in contemporary art, the brainchild of Ingrid Schaffner, then Chief Curator at the ICA.
Roberta: The Big Nothing was a Big Something! It was a great idea and a great citywide festival of shows. Yours was special.
Richard: Thanks. Sandra and I had become excited by the idea of realizing a group exhibition in which the gallery would appear empty despite being filled with artwork. We were eager to participate in the festival even though the gallery was typically closed during the summer due to its lack of air conditioning. The exhibition title, Open, alluded to this as well as the fact that to make the space hospitable, its windows and doors had to remain open during visiting hours. It also meant that the 58 works we ended up including had to withstand the temperatures inside the non-air conditioned space.
Among these was a glazed ceramic brick produced by Paula Winokur (1936-2018), who led the ceramics program at the school for over 30 years. Winokur’s contribution, the surface of which suggests a topographic relief, filled a gap in the gallery wall left by a brick that had fallen out years before. (Winokur’s work is still there, visible just above the sheetrock in the back corner.) Some of these pieces were extremely small and slight. Others were camouflaged by their apparent utility, such as Phil Grauer’s turned wood replica of a smoke alarm and two “event” pieces from 1961 by George Brecht employing the exit sign and gallery telephone. Others were “scores” or instructions, such as Yoko Ono’s “Draw a Line, Erase a Line” (1964) or Rob Pruitt’s “Pull the tree branch just outside your window into the room,” from his 101 art ideas you can do yourself (1999-2004). For this we placed a potted oak sapling directly outside one of the east-facing ground-floor windows. After the show, we planted the tree on a hill near the gallery where it has flourished and now stands about 40 feet high.
Some works were invisible, such as the spell cast by Jeremiah Misfeldt, and two silent sound works. Dave Allen’s “For the Dogs: Satie’s ‘Véritable Préludes Flasques (pour un chien)” 1912, rendered at tone frequencies above 18Khz, (2002), could only be heard by dogs. There was also an AM radio signal broadcasting live sound gathered by a microphone suspended from the ceiling, a work by Jonathon Monk. (Its title, “During the exhibition the gallery will be open,” referred to Robert Barry’s 1969 “Closed Gallery,” the description for which read, “For the exhibition the gallery will be closed.”) Linda Yun was represented by a work that filled the gallery with a fragrance of ginger and spices generated by oils warmed by a power strip overnight. There were several wall drawings, including a work by Sol LeWitt and a landscape by Randall Sellers that could only be seen when you were standing directly in front of it. Do you remember him at all?
Roberta: Sure do.
Richard: One of the many sobering things that this project confirmed for me was that no matter how well you know your audience, you can never be sure about how it will interpret an exhibition. Despite our efforts to represent relevant examples of Fluxus and Conceptual Art, which we thought were critical to the historical legacy of the empty gallery space, many visitors experienced the show as a treasure hunt or a version of “Where’s Waldo.” In the end, however, this focus on perception and the identification of things hiding in plain sight was part of the point.
And of course, our experiments with the space followed examples that Paula Marincola had set with her installations for Maura Sheehan, Rona Pondick, and Donald Lipski, whose Flag Balls (1990) were presented on a floor that had been painted an almost blinding white. Paula’s 1992 exhibition for Richard Prince included a text painting hung upside down and a group of others leaning against the wall. Her solo show for Yukinori Yanagi capitalized on the height of the space to present an image depicting the mushroom cloud created by the explosion of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Printed on voile at the Fabric Workshop, it rose 17 feet out of a lead box incised with the codename for the bomb, “Little Boy.”
Paula’s progressive program between 1988 and 1997 included a heady mix of thematic group shows and solo shows for artists such as Jennifer Bolande, James Welling, Felix González-Torres, Thomas Nozkowski, and so many others too numerous to mention comprehensively here. They made a hard but inspiring act to follow, especially given that most of these exhibitions were accompanied by catalogs and printed brochures with commissioned texts, not to mention an impressive roster of speakers for whom Paula consistently crafted the most eloquent introductions. I tried to follow the precedents she set and attempted to meet her standards, not only in terms of curating but in her regard for her colleagues in the art department.
For example, she established a legacy of exhibitions focused on clay, in part, to recognize Paula Winokur’s efforts in the ceramics department. A 1992 solo exhibition show for Daisy Youngblood, timed to coincide with the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) in Philadelphia that year, was followed in 1994 by one of the first presentations of ceramic works produced by painter Mary Heilmann. A show for Ken Price followed in 1995.
Our exhibitions for Ai Weiwei (2010) and Polly Apfelbaum (2022) were conscious attempts to extend this legacy, thanks to support from Gregg Moore, Winokur’s successor. It was Gregg who recommended that we present Ai Weiwei’s iconoclastic ceramic works to coincide with the NCECA conference hosted in Philadelphia that year, a show that generated debate, if not outrage, among some of the conference attendees, which was the plan. Gregg co-curated that exhibition and went on to facilitate the production of all of Polly’s glazed ceramic quilts for her 2022 exhibition.
Paula had an interest in text-based work, which informed many of her shows. These included the presentation of Glenn Ligon’s “Notes on the Margin of the Black Book,” (1991-93), a response to Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1988 The Black Book photographs, Kenneth Goldsmith’s “73 Poems – A Series of 80 Drawings” (1993), and a group show entitled Word for Word that featured what I believe was the first iteration of Kay Rosen’s wall painting “Leak” (1995).
Paula also created significant opportunities for local artists in both group and solo shows, including an exhibition for Phoebe Adams and an ambitious installation/performance by AP Gorny. Do you remember him?
Roberta: I remember the name.
Richard: I think it’s also important to mention the history that preceded Paula’s tenure, which included shows for artists such as Robert Morris, Barry Le Va, Lee Krasner, Faith Ringgold, Alice Neel, and Dorthea Rockburne, among others. These shows were presented in a gallery on the ground floor of the school library before it had to move to the current location in the Spruance Gallery in 1985 thanks to a car accidentally being driven through that space’s large picture window. I credit Matt Borgen for helping to recuperate the history of the gallery from its inception in 1962 to 1988, when Paula took the reins from Zina Goldsmith, the first person to be hired in that position to do work that was previously managed by faculty in the art department. Matt and I did our best to honor this legacy—which we started to think of as the DNA of the program—in a pair of exhibitions in 2015 organized to celebrate the 30th anniversary of this relocation.
Roberta: You definitely had big shoes to fill at Beaver/Arcadia. Talk about growing your exhibitions and programs there.
Richard: I had a lot to learn in 1997 during my first year at Beaver. With the exception of William Anastasi, I had not curated any nationally known artists and was excited to be wielding a wider net. Thanks to the funding from Pew, eventually we were able to invite Olafur Eliasson, Ai Weiwei, and Tacita Dean to present shows at Arcadia—and before Tate Modern had commissioned each to do installations for its Turbine Hall. Just the possibility of being able to offer the kind of generous resources to artists that Pew makes available was incentive enough to reach out to these artists, regardless of the outcome of our proposals. Here I would also commend Pew for the way it had fostered curatorial research by supporting opportunities for travel that would not be feasible otherwise.
Roberta: Let’s talk about Scott Kip’s installation, which I did love – it was your last curatorial project, and you had been planning it with Scott for a couple years, I believe.
Richard: I’m still pondering Perpetual Inventory because there was so much there to think about, especially when I regard it as a kind of culminating project for my time at Arcadia. It had been simmering in some form or another since Scott’s exhibition at Fleisher in 2010. Michael Grothusen introduced me to Scott in 2004 thinking he might be an ideal artist to include in Open. Scott visited the gallery and proposed documenting a shadow cast by light from its upper west window to create an analemma, a diagram showing the position of the sun in the sky as seen from a fixed location at the same time each day over the course of the show. The result would be a portion of the “figure-eight” (or “infinity”) curve that would suggest both a calendar and clock. I loved the idea but the logistics of making it happen in the time we had available became prohibitive.
Nonetheless, this started a conversation that expanded with each of his projects, especially after his 2015 installation at Marginal Utility and his 2018 show at Penn State, Abington. His Arcadia project became much more concrete in 2019 when he first told me about the beadboard he wanted to rescue from Episcopal Cathedral in West Philadelphia, which became the walls for the final passage of Perpetual Inventory.
One of the things that I admired about Scott’s installation was how it eluded attempts to categorize it. I think the closest someone came was a comment in the sign-in book comparing it to an Egyptian tomb. There was, of course, something dark about Scott’s show and how his mortality was built into it. Scott, as you know, claimed that the project was an attempt to make a sculpture out of everything that had ever happened to him.
Roberta: I definitely picked up the darkness, but also the love. The whole up and down existence of a human.
Richard: At the Q&A following a presentation he made at Arcadia in October last year, his reply to a question about why audiences would want to see a gallery filled with someone’s personal belongings has stuck with me. Scott’s answer diverted attention from the objects to prioritize the position of the viewer. He explained that the structure he built staged specific relationships between the viewer and the many tableaux he had arranged that were haptic and precise in their spatial and temporal coordinates. Where the viewer stood in relation to the specific chronological sequence of materials on view was critical. It was not an accident that the only way to see the oldest item of the inventory—a stuffed animal given to Scott at his birth, his “transitional object”—was to stand, if not crouch, on a small patch of the original floor of the gallery that his construction had left exposed and was otherwise not accessible.
When you walk into a conventional exhibition, your body travels from one object or image to the next. Even if the path of the viewer is deliberately mapped out, there is still some allowance for moving about as one wishes. I think Scott was trying to restrict that freedom, which we take for granted, and remove these contingent, impulsive trajectories from the equation in order to encourage the kind of bodily attention he strives for. It was in this way the installation’s two mechanized mirrors became important as instruments for extending vision, not unlike the way a periscope enables its operator to move about optically within a space that is not available physically.
25’ x 50’ x 30 ’ high. Cane plane = 37″ high x 1200 sf, Beaver College Art Gallery. Photo courtesy of the gallery
When John Muse, who you must know, and James Weisinger from Haverford College visited the show, we joked about the word “immersive” and how it has been exhausted as a term to describe installations. We decided, instead, that the elevated, enveloping, corridor of Perpetual Inventory was actually “anti-immersive.” Scott’s piece now reminds me of Amy Hauft’s Period Room (1998), an installation that also restricted the viewer’s movement. In this case, visitors were offered three paths through a waist-high plane made entirely of woven caning, each of which ended in a cul-de-sac, a chaise longue hand-made by Hauft. Once reclining, the viewer was placed in an ideal position to look at the ceiling of the gallery and its exposed trusses, which Scott, too, invited us to study.
Roberta: I agree that the piece was very controlled. And as I think of it now it seems like a real world analog of a Mario Brothers video game. Dead ends, twists, turns, treasures along the route, and of course the game maker is ultimately the one in control.
Richard: I like that. Perpetual Inventory helped me think in new ways about what it is to make an exhibition by complicating our fundamental apprehension of objects. The very deliberate, orchestrated, situation he established has made my routine experience with exhibitions seem almost too easy.
Roberta: It’s fluid. It felt very fluid. Like if you turned your back on it and you looked around, things could have changed. It had that feeling that it was not static.
Richard: I hope that Scott has the chance to present another version of the work again somewhere.
Roberta: So where are we? Let’s talk about your Printed Matter show before we leave Arcadia. You had this exhibition that became an extension of Printed Matter, the artist book shop, publisher, and distributor in Chelsea.
Richard: It was called Admire Desire Acquire, a title based on a work by Lawrence Wiener that was also used for a T-shirt produced by Printed Matter. (The announcement card for the show depicted the front and back of this shirt.) My affection for the organization goes back to the mid-1980s, before my time at City Without Walls. I was working for an architectural firm in New York— Eric R. Kuhn and Associates—assisting with a range of things, including photographing architectural models and using the photocopier to set type in “Stoneface,” a font Eric had developed that employed the copier to degrade a classic serif typeface, maybe it was Trajan, but I’m guessing now. Copying and recopying these capital letters roughened their smooth contours, making them appear abraded and ragged, and ironically, more natural looking.
Roberta: How wonderful!
Richard: The office was around the corner from Lispenard Street, in Tribeca, the original location of Printed Matter. So once a week or so, at lunch, I would visit. It was here that I bought my first artist’s books and became enamored of this affordable, transportable art. And it was this experience that I wanted to bring to campus, specifically to students.
I believe that we love books even if we don’t read them because they can represent, if not embody, ideas that matter to us. I also think that all books point to a nebulous moment in the future when one might have the opportunity to read them. I have fantasized about how wonderful it would be if each book we owned somehow came with the time needed to read it. One of the great things about artist’s books is that because so many of them are visual, or purely sculptural, they can be “read” or experienced in their entirety, sometimes in the space of a few minutes or less.
The physical economy of the codex form—pages bound by a spine—allows a book to contain content that can feel disproportionate to its physical dimensions, uncountable numbers of words and images all in one manageable place. They also have so many formal amenities, front and back covers and spines we can see from across the room but also the sensuality of heft and surface that come with paper and cloth. Books are comfortable to handle, accumulate and store. I wanted to do an exhibition that explored all this. Did you see it?
Roberta: Yes, and I desired and acquired books and zines. It was wonderful.
Richard: At that time, Tristin Lowe was the gallery installation technician and together we conceived a very simple display strategy, a tilted shelf (about 2-feet wide) of unpainted MDF, mounted at waist height that would line every wall and at their corners, meet at angles like a picture frame. Visitors could walk around the space looking down at the books or sit on one of the five piano stools on wheels we purchased from Ikea. I remember being almost gleeful the day we set up the show after all the work of building and installing the shelf was done and placing the books on the shelves in alphabetical order. It took maybe an hour and we were done.
The books sort of labeled themselves, but we had to have a checklist to facilitate sales. We scheduled the show for November-December to encourage people to think of the books as possible gifts. We only had one copy of most of the titles, so once a book was sold, it remained in the gallery until the end of the exhibition, on loan courtesy of the purchaser.
Roberta: I love that. You also organized a second book exhibition that took a different approach.
Richard: Yes. That was the 2019 exhibition, Writers Making Books, which we developed as part of the citywide Walt Whitman bicentennial here (“Whitman at 200: Art and Democracy”). The show, which was co-curated by Zachary See, a 2016 graduate of Arcadia’s MA program in English, was inspired by Whitman’s hands-on control of the six editions of Leaves of Grass that he produced. Researching the details about his use of printing and paper, the book’s various covers, and liberties Whitman took to revise the poems over the years, opened up an appreciation for the range of creative possibilities with the text, printing, and the materiality of books, however limited, exercised by authors as opposed to graphic designers. Once again, Printed Matter became a fantastic resource, as did the Center for Book Arts (New York). We also had help from Philadelphia-based book makers Marianne Dages and Ditta Baron Hoeber, along with Nicholas Muellner, co-director of Ithaca College’s image–text MFA program and with whom we had worked on several exhibition and book projects before. The show included a selection of essays self-published as Xerox zines by Willliam Pym, who spoke at the opening.
Increasingly I find myself agreeing with Stéphane Mallarmé that “everything exists to end in a book,” including other books. The hybrid practices of artists/writers such as Ditta Baron Hoeber, for example, demonstrate the book as a means of both expansion and concentration intrinsic to its physical structure. I respect Ditta’s commitment to this form because of the way it privileges modes of quiet, analog intimacy that I think are increasingly valuable. I also like how books such as hers consistently challenge conventional modes of exhibition making and point to tensions between private and public spaces that represent potential territory for exploration and innovation.
Roberta: I like that you say that books are intimate because they really are. And if you think about a catalog for a show, there are a lot of people who are gonna go to a show and maybe not be able to form an opinion until they get away from the show. And maybe looking at the catalog gives them that intimacy with the show that allows an opinion – or an appreciation – to pop out and for the person to say, oh yeah.
Richard: I agree, the chance to experience the exhibition again, away from the show in a different setting, can be important. I’m reminded of the Inventory we produced for Scott’s project, which I think most people didn’t get around to reading until they had left campus. That it was a book—a hand-made object rather than a list on a piece of paper—not only encouraged people to keep it but gave it a deeper connection to the installation, which, of course, is now gone. Most copies produced were made on a Xerox machine in Scott’s studio, which adds another layer of association.
Roberta: That Inventory is a gift.
Richard: Exhibitions are by nature temporary and ephemeral. Whatever afterlife they have is nevertheless part of the experience. The materiality of the exhibition catalog extends the lifespan of the show but also helps it become a souvenir of the moment and conditions in which it occurred, many of which may have been invisible to us then.
Roberta: Richard, I think we’ve got to wrap it up here. It’s been such a good conversation and good storytelling. We’ve touched on a lot of history and can we say philosophy of curating, exhibiting and art practices. Thank You!
Sample Artblog’s coverage of Arcadia University exhibitions
Scott Kip – review by Roberta
Scott Kip – interview with the artist by Ryan and Roberta
Quentin Morris – review by Sharon Garbe
Polly Apfelbaum and David Ellinger – review by Kate Brock
Writers Making Books – podcast interview with Richard Torchia and Zachary See
Pati Hill – review by Roberta
Tacita Dean – review by Roberta
Francis Cape – review by Roberta
What’s It Worth – Works on Paper – review by Libby
Dave Allen and the Birds – feature by Roberta
