Chris Tanner: Here's Looking At You

Chris Tanner Here’s Looking at You September 5–30, 2018 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project

Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the 60s and 70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between the art and the viewer. More to the experience than described, Howl! Happening curates exhibitions and stages live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater——a cultural stew that defies easy definition.

For more than a decade, Howl! Festival has been an annual community event——a free summer happening in and around Tompkins Square Park, dedicated to celebrating the past and future of contemporary culture in the East Village and the Lower East Side.

The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife are even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the “father” of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”

Chris Tanner Here’s Looking at You

Published on the occasion of the exhibition September 5–30, 2018 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 25

A Call to LOVE

By Karen Finley

Glitter, glamour, melody, and voice.

Loyalty, adornment, lilac icing on cake

His last dollar, will gladly give to you

A tinsel tiger carries your weight

Made for you from heaven’s gate

It is art, my dear

We are here

Have a cup of tizzy tea

And wear your best frock

We are together

And that is reason enough

This is an artist not only with talent but with generosity and genuine care Troubadour musical delight His art brings enchantment To a world that takes and breaks our love and soul Yet Tanner’s art always has room for a rainbow view, a phoenix flutter, a December rose.

This aesthetic commitment of his, as genuine impulse Is his dedication to humanity, to witness against all ugly To assist and refuse degradation but to pedestal This prism, A Call to LOVE. In particular, in this age of attack Of oppression, crazy cruel xenophobia Tanner reimagines a better vision of ourselves A reliving, a surround-scape escape-scape of wonder Of human potential against all things Wicked monster But to impress via his own rose-colored Jeweled glasses to start with our own joy attitude With celebratory defiance.

Every piece of Tanner’s is like a piece of birthday cake Another year, another milestone Blow and make a wish In his paintings wishes do come true

As a two-year-old Tanner convalesced in a hospital, following surgery for the condition of a prematurely-closed soft spot in his skull. Panels were cut on the sides of his skull, allowing his brain room to grow. After surgery, he would be required to wear a football helmet for two years to protect his head. One cannot imagine the loneliness and suffering he went through. Despite this difficult beginning, Tanner never despaired or complained or became bitter. He had the care and daily visit of his mother Sally*, who traveled the 100-mile roundtrip to the hospital every day for a year and a half. Yet he transformed his waiting, the child-cruel bullying, the agony of his disfigurement into a triumphant claim of creativity, delight, and inner DIVA calling.

We need Tanner’s work now. At this moment, now more than ever, we need to collectively embrace art as celebration; glamour as resistance; desire, allure and romance as defiance. His appropriation of everything shimmery reminds us about the surface thrill-shrill shallowness of empty promises and things bling. But we can dance. Wear perfume to cover the stink. His extreme embellishments and décor-defused accoutrements expose the blur of grotesque quick-change artists. He is really saying what matters is the love within, rather than without. His artworks simultaneously occupy disenchantment while straddling against existentialism with temporary flash. Tanner refuses to retreat during times of deepest loss, the most desperate times for himself and our community.

Photo of artist’s residence Large art piece: How High the Moon, 2019 96 x 96 inches

Yes…his art bliss has a vulnerability, a curious courageous inspiration, a swirl of saved ribbons and gift wrap. Just to be close to you.

Christopher Tanner is the best of friends and devoted citizen. He cares about his friends, his community, his partner Anthony Rocanello, his family, and other artists. And this caring is evident in his artmaking. By picking up small pieces—montaging mosaic elements and fragmented memory into compositions to steady our way—he is unapologetic in an opposition to deconstruction. He rather constructs and builds on the strength and materiality of assemblage and collage. His hands get dirty in the making. Body expression is present. This isn’t about the privilege of high-concept art reserved for a few in the know. His paintings are exercises in sensation.

His art speaks of a yearning, a longing, a word translatable only in Portuguese: saudade. This missingness is a nameless melancholia, a void always present in so many of our generation. For Tanner, who lost his partner Steve Lott in 1991 to AIDS, the journey of creating art during grief is particularly resonant. We have lost so many friends, yet his life and work rise out of these times. They are a testament of endurance— that we can and will be alive—a blessing of the mirrored beasts as reminders of ornamentation, on parade, as costume. Tanner’s work pays homage to the glory of being—a fete—and the decadence of chance encounter to thrive despite the odds.

And damn it, why not! Give us magnificence within a frame. Let us have perspective with your lavish, kaleidoscope treasure as deserved. Tanner straddles his generosity not in a linear trope but through borders of consumption, appetite, deliverance, and over-the-top-credo: a nouveau riche declaration of silly, ravishing jubilance. His paintings speak and question the authenticity of preciousness, royalty, and inherited and accumulated wealth. With the creative act, there is the beckoning or reckoning to even out the world of neglect, abandonment, and impoverishment. His work is a stained glass lens against the inhumanity of tragic circumstances, surviving with the memories of what remains. If I can’t see the world as it is, I can see how it can be.

Tanner’s abstraction process is a way to reorganize and clarify chaos in a directed, managed shattering. Literally—he picks up the pieces. His gemmed landscapes are body mappings: a closer-looking, glazing-gazing skin cell in microscopic technicolor. At times, he stops at rotundas of organs and lashes. These works are inside us: a galaxy of utopian senses of eyes, ears, taste, and aroma, saturated with a deep feeling of interiority.

Don’t be fooled by the robust festive excitement. Tanner’s work has a mission: to command space and respect for the queer body and desire.

We stand at attention.

Christopher Tanner’s art speaks to remembering, honoring, and celebrating life, love, and art. A dazzling occasion to behold…. Art as a call to LOVE.

*Sally Tanner (born 1926) represented California’s 60th District in the California State Assembly from 1979 to 1992. She authored the Lemon Law, which protects buyers from defective vehicles that cannot be repaired after a reasonable number of attempts.

Faces in the Crowd Series

Beads, glitter, sand, mixed media on antique wallpaper

Faces in the Crowd #11, 2016

19 x 22 inches

Faces in the Crowd #12, 2016 12.5 x 17.5 inches

Faces in the Crowd #7, 2016 24.5 x 35 inches

Faces in the Crowd #6, 2016

24.5 x 34.25 inches

In Chris Tanner’s Art, Images That Look Back

By Edward M. Gómez

Consider the so-called male gaze examining the male gaze itself as it lingers admiringly upon unclothed male bodies—and, pointedly, not upon those of disrobed women. Such a point of view, at once aesthetic, appreciative, erotic, and maybe even political, is the very self-aware starting point of the group of drawings that inspire the title of Chris Tanner’s latest solo exhibition, Here’s Looking at You. That phrase comes, of course, from Humphrey Bogart’s immortal quip, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” which he addresses to Ingrid Bergman several times in the film Casablanca (1942).

Here, though, throughout this mini-retrospective focusing on his art-making ideas and experiments of the past several years, Tanner evokes the meaning and spirit of that well-known line to call attention to how important the act of looking—meaning, for an artist, of observing, analyzing, and comprehending—is for him as a maker of images. “Here’s looking at you” is also Tanner’s sly manner of letting viewers know that, in their own ways, however inexplicably or magically, his creations and their subjects may be seen as flipping their observers’ vantage points and, in effect, gazing back at them. After all, what is a supposedly interactive encounter with a work of art if not a reciprocally communicative, intellectual-emotional exchange between artist, viewer, and artwork alike?

Here’s Looking at You presents a survey of several different but often thematically or technically related bodies of work that Tanner has created in the recent past, including large-scale, wall-mounted, mixed-media assemblages; glitter-and-mixed-media drawings on swatches of old, printed-pattern wallpaper; and his drawings in pencil or in pencil and oil pastel on paper of languid—and lust-worthy—male nudes.

Recently, Tanner told me: “I’m fascinated by line, color, and texture, in the human form or wherever I find them, and I’m not afraid of beauty.

Whether my subject is something completely abstract, from my imagination, or something—or someone—in the ‘real world’ that I’m depicting, I’m going to make it beautiful.”

The enthusiasm Tanner brings to his own adventures and discoveries as an observer has long found expression in his art’s unabashed

Photo of the artist’s residence Portrait of Chris Tanner by Chris Sharp

celebration of the luscious, the sensuous, the glamorous, and all that dazzles and shines.

As a reflection of his creative drive, the art-making language Tanner has developed to give his aesthetic vibe tangible form is one that also waves a glitter-covered flag for the life force. It’s inescapable in his mixed-media confections, with their shimmering paillette-, bauble-, and fake-jewel-encrusted surfaces serving up real, irony-be-damned luxe; and in his wallpaper drawings, in which big eyes and big, ruddy lips emerge out of printed-pattern backgrounds like the free-floating faces of vixens in a fog; and in his recent portraits, in which his male models display their most private parts with the insouciance of kids at play mixed with the come-hither tease of experienced pole dancers. (Tanner renders their orifices and protuberances in a florid style, as succulent attributes of sensually curvaceous, sometimes dizzyingly contorted bodies.)

All of these ideas and energies come together in Tanner’s newest works: his large-scale, mixed-media “paintings” of peacocks, which he normally depicts in pairs. A sense of beauty becomes cocky and self-aware in these richly textured images of big, majestic male birds savoring the spectacle of their remarkable plumage. For if any creature knows what it feels like to be ogled and admired for its appearance (as a sign of its strength and desirability), certainly it is the male peacock, whose stunning display of fully unfurled, iridescent upper-tail feathers is one of the wonders of the animal world. “Here’s looking at you,” a peacock, like Tanner’s male nudes, might think as he looks back at human spectators relishing his hapless magnificence.

Vivacious and finely handcrafted, Tanner’s creations share affinities with the thematic and technical concerns of certain kinds of works that emerged out of the Feminist Art, and Pattern and Decoration movements that flourished from the late 1960s through the 1980s. (Unlike many of his postmodernist peers, Tanner, a hands-on art-maker, would never think of sending out a design to merely be fabricated for him.)

His art has also been influenced by his long, deep involvement in the theater as an actor, singer, playwright, and dramaturge. If a sense of spectacle comes naturally to him, it also flows directly into his art.

During a recent chat at his studio, the artist said: “I want to make art that grabs you—with color, light, energy, and life!”

Here’s looking at where that creative spirit has led him.

Here’s looking at you.

Faces in the Crowd #1, 2016 38.25 x 18.25 inches

Faces in the Crowd #2, 2016 49 x 19.25 inches

Faces in the Crowd #14, 2016 36 x 30 inches

Faces in the Crowd #8, 2016 18.25 x 31 inches

Faces in the Crowd #5, 2016

25.125 x 27 inches

Faces in the Crowd #10, 2016 22 x 29 inches

Faces in the Crowd #5, 2016

12.5 x 24.5 inches

Faces in the Crowd #3, 2016 23.75 x 24.5 inches

Faces in the Crowd #4, 2016

28 x 28.375 inches

Peacocks per Tutti

By Robert Kushner

Moderation is a fatal thing.

Nothing succeeds like excess.

—Oscar Wilde

Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.

—Mae West

Chris Tanner’s latest excesses are definitely too much and are definitely wonderful. In this amazing exhibition covering the entire span of Tanner’s work, two recent diptych paintings of mirrored peacocks steal my heart.

These creatures offer a vivid occasion for Tanner to spread his own wings and show off his bricollaging skills, his unique way of creating images out of a diverse array of existing materials.

I have always thought that if Tanner had attended the Bauhaus school, that bastion of reductivist modernism, his over-the-top aesthetic would have withered on the vine. Fortunately, New York’s taste for the overripe gave him a great pool of colleagues and supporters as his unique work emerged and grew.

Peacocks? Allow me to digress. In contrast to the aridity of minimalist presentation, the real school of life for Tanner would have been in Delhi in the 1640s. The Peacock Throne, created for the supreme monarch and aesthete Shah Jahan, was a most impressive object. It took six years to complete and cost more than twice the construction expenses of the Taj Mahal. The French jeweler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who examined the throne during his sixth voyage to India, described the bejewelled wonder in his 1676 publication Les Six Voyages de J. B. Tavernier:

The underside of the canopy was covered with diamonds and pearls, with a fringe of pearls all round, and above the canopy […] there is to be seen a peacock with elevated tail made of blue sapphires and other coloured stones, the body being of gold inlaid with precious stones, having a large ruby in front of the breast, from whence hangs a pear-shaped pearl of 50 carats or thereabouts, and of a somewhat yellow water.

On both sides of the peacock there was a large bouquet of the same height as the bird, and consisting of many kinds of flowers made of gold inlaid with precious stones. On the side of the throne which is opposite the court there is to be seen a jewel consisting of a diamond of from 80 to 90 carats weight, with rubies and emeralds round it, and when the King is seated he has this jewel in full view.

Gates to Paradise, 2018

Beads, jewels, glitter, sand, mixed media on wood 90 x 60 inches

Hello, Chris, we all know you were there.

Or what about James McNeill Whistler’s The Peacock Room (1876), now installed in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Were you on board there too? Fighting peacocks in oil paint and gilding on leather panels…surely you painted the eyes of their feathers.

Let’s forget about the ‘negative press’ that peacocks receive as symbols of pride and vanity. I prefer to think about your peacocks as descendants of the royal birds who strutted their stuff throughout ancient history.

A peacock was the dignified mount of the Hindu god of war Kartikeya, a manly dude if ever there was one. Hera, queen of the Grecian pantheon, had her own peacocks to protect her. Her chariot was pulled by peacocks. That must have been quite a sight. And sound.

Ancient Greeks believed the flesh of peafowl did not decay after death, so the peacock became a symbol of immortality. This symbolism was adopted by early Christians, with many religious paintings and mosaics showing the mythic bird. A peacock drinking from a vase was a symbol of a true believer ingesting the waters of eternal life.

And then, Mr. Tanner, what about your childhood and mine, with the advent of color television? In 1956, we first experienced the daily worship of an abstract eleven-feathered peacock, the ubiquitous and instantlyrecognizable logo for American television broadcaster NBC. Living peacocks sometimes roamed wild in the San Gabriel Valley suburbs of your childhood and mine, their piercing screams loud enough to wake you out of slumber. Their shedded feathers were sometimes found in the backyard.

These are your peacocks, Chris, free from historical limitation: fierce, resplendent, decorative, and full of color. You have rendered them in rhinestones, crystals, old German paste, seed beads, shelf paper, glass, tiger eye, polyester glitter, and shells, with acrylic paint holding the mélange together. Their sparkle is blinding. Meticulously, madly, compulsively, wildly, you merge these materials to make two peacocks staring at each other—defying one another with their grandeur.

Are they fighting? One with open beak? Are they preening? Or protecting their territory and kin from interlopers? Are they so magnificent they can only be lovers of each other, with no one else remotely worthy?

Are they modern evocations of the above iterations? Or is it enough that they are resolutely present, standing defiantly, confident in their encrusted excessiveness?

Royal Flush, 2018

Beads, jewels, glitter, sand, mixed media on wood 72 x 36 inches

Can’t Stop the Rain (detail), 2017 Sequins, glitter, paillettes, jewels, minerals, holographic shelf paper, mixed media on canvas 35 x 39 inches

For My Father, 2007

Sequins, glitter, paillettes, hair, jewels, embroidery on silk, antique artifacts, minerals, objects, aluminum disks, ribbon, mixed media 72 x 72 inches

Hand In The Pool of Maria Montez, 2007 Sequins, glitter, paillettes, hair, jewels, embroidery on silk, antique artifacts, minerals, objects, aluminum disks, ribbon, mixed media 90 x 90 inches

Nudes, 2013-2016

Pencil, oil pastel (color) on 14 x 17 inches Bristol 14 x 17 inches, 17 x 28 inches, 14 x 32 inches

The I of the Beholder

By Carlo McCormick

All that glitters may not be gold, but there is room in aesthetics for the ersatz that sparkles and beguiles all the more for its tawdry materiality, for the intimations of the imitation delivered in surfeit, anointed by the obsession of craft and made transcendent by the suspended belief of impersonation. Christopher Tanner’s radical embroidery is of just such a cloth, improvisations of importune immediacy delivered with ebullient excess. His is a daft kind of outlier art let loose from the sobriety and seriousness that restrains so much of fine art, but part of a wilder tradition of over-the-top ornamentation that lies like a frivolously frilly fringe on the margins of high art’s dour raiment, altogether a historical other that taken together constitute a crazy-quilt of ulterior beauty.

Tanner’s tapestry paintings are the antithesis of minimalism’s primary structures, eschewing the reductive while celebrating the secondary, tertiary, unnecessary, and incidental as manifest of new meanings beheld in the confluence of myriad details. Little things matter, and too much is never enough.

Surface as form, manifold and mesmerizing, an erotic rapture of unfettered hedonism without apotheosis or climax (or is it rather ceaseless orgasm?), Christopher Tanner’s vision is oceanic, expansive in a way that intimates depth as it belies it, the horror vacui subsuming perspective and obviating distance in the gluttony of indulgent fancies. Exaggerated and ostentatious yet without the irony of camp, affected (though sincere and unpretentious) to the point of extreme effect, Tanner makes art that is queer for its outré difference, sexual preference, and effeminate opulence. This theatricality, the elaborate staging of desire as a kind of lowbrow glamour, is at once a historical lineage and startling contemporaneousness within this work. It is central to the downtown vernacular of New York style, the DIY modified thrift store fashions of the nightlife, the amateur pageantry of its performance art, and the low-budget exoticism of its transformative art—running particularly strong in the East Village and suffusing the sumptuous and seductive swank of artists like Jack Smith, John Torreano, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Ethyl Eichelberger, Rhonda Zwillinger, and Tanner’s direct mentor Arch Connelly.

Art that flowers in unorthodoxy, whose blooms are too florid for the eyes and fragrances cloyingly sweet, surges past the bounds of decorum into the effluvia of deranged décor, and in such a leap dances close to the cultural taboo we call kitsch. This is no mistake, no lapse of judgment but rather quite deliberate. At once a sensibility and a strategy, the mannerisms of kitsch have constituted a forbidden path out of the dialectic orderliness of modernism. Chris Tanner is utterly earnest and reverent in his embrace of the gaudy; it is a matter of

heart and soul even as intellectually it is also pulling our leg. In a culture where the spiritual is bound up in a puritanical refusal of pleasure, Tanner reminds us of an ecstatic sublime. Here kitsch is not simply some failure of taste, as it is in so many other garish things people take for art, but a fabulous indecency with a specific antagonism against propriety. Be it a personal proclivity or a more political polemic, kitsch resides in the pluralism of post-modernism as a balm for the chafing constraints of refinement. That is, for all its indulgence it is ultimately an oppositional tactic set against that great modernist champion Clement Greenberg’s proclamation that for every avant-garde there is a rear guard, and that rear guard is kitsch.

Before it became such a loose adjective for all that is culturally reviled, kitsch represented a sham impersonation of the spiritual, born at the time when religious artifacts like crosses were no longer the sole domain of craftsmen whose hands were guided by divinity but mass produced on the assembly lines of industrial age manufacture.

Tanner’s transgression then is a kind of mystical sin, that he worships what we shun, a false god of superfluity versus purity. This is gothic multiplied and maximized to a rambunctious rococo, handed down like the heirloom family jewels since the 12th century, when Abbot Suger ushered in the gothic era at St. Denis with a profligacy of gold, silver, luridly colored stained glass, sapphires, rubies, and whatever other jewels might sparkle most to amplify experience through architectural splendor and relate the immaterial through the most material of terms.

Or as he inscribed on the very portal of his cathedral: “All those who seek to honor these doors, marvel not at the gold and expense but at the craftsmanship of the work. The noble work is bright, but being nobly bright, the work should brighten the minds, allowing them to travel through the lights.”

Finally, since Christopher Tanner’s adoration is of an entirely different order, let us revel a bit in the unorthodox object of his affection—the asshole. Describing this oft overlooked and systematically despised bit of anatomy we all share, Chris told us they are “like heaven, a portal or stairway” to that sacred space. For this artist, as for all true believers, it is not about the fleshy fact so much as its transmogrification into the transcendent. “It’s about energy and its transmission,” he explains, “it’s not a predatory gaze but a loving meditation on beauty. It’s all about looking, the asshole and the oculus, looking for love.” The title of this exhibition, Here’s Looking at You, that memorable line of familiar seduction from Casablanca, is in tribute to the love his family taught him, taken from his mother’s female partner who always toasted her by saying those words. But so too is it about the power of looking, the awe as

registered in the eye. What we do not see, where the sun doesn’t shine and society holds as private as well as somehow shameful, has been excised from our language regarding beauty and the divine. There, unspeakable and out of sight it has far from been out of our mind, buried deep under the social armature of etiquette it has lodged in our collective imagination, slipping out through our bawdy humor—or if you’re Freudian through all manner of pathology—and finding rare voice in a chorus of heretic hymns to this forbidden passage, from the vulgar yet fantastical marginalia drawn by monks on the borders of medieval manuscripts to the preoccupations of Georges Bataille and his L’Anus Solaire.

Christopher Tanner, a total top who finds his salvation through submission to the asshole, has found the heaven above by looking below, the twinkle in an eye that does not blink. Art for him, as with so many before, is a sublimate act of love. Unusual, and perhaps shocking for some, he is not alone in this regard, preceded in a posterior poetics of this inner sanctum by the likes of John Waters’ Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot, and a remarkable book by Allen Ginsberg’s longtime lover Peter Orlovsky, Clean Asshole Poems. Sadly overlooked since its publication in 1977 and largely dismissed not just for its subject matter but because Orlovsky’s genius was illiterate, and he couldn’t spell, it is a paean on the order of Tanner’s, and the great beat Gregory Corso’s introduction to the book speaks well to the passion of Tanner’s work:

He hails the human asshole as divine — He offers humankind an anatomical compassion for that bodily part long-maligned, shame-wracked, and poetically neglect. Keep it clean in between is a golden define of self-respect. The angel without wings is with asshole a reality. The angel with wings is a painted thing, a dream.

The dual asshole: bucolic and sexual. What comes out, he believes, aught benefit the fields not the seas, aught fertilize not pollute — What goes in, he lauds as a variable of sex not solely of homosexual kind — The lovers of callipygian joy are universal.

HOWL! COMMUNITY Arturo Vega Foundation

Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker BOARD OF ADVISORS

Dan Cameron Curt Hoppe Carlo McCormick Marc H. Miller Maynard Monroe Lisa Brownlee James Rubio Debora Tripodi Howl! Board of Directors

Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus Founder and Executive Director: Jane Friedman Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Program Coordinator: Sam O’Hana Collection Manager: Corinne Gatesmith Production Team: Ramsey Chahine, Josh Nierodzinski Marketing and Public Relations: Susan Martin Videographer: Yoon Gallery design: Space ODT/ Teddy Kofman Creative Consultant: Some Serious Business Gallery Photographer: Jason Wyche

SPECIAL THANKS: Thanks to my mother, who discussed peacocks with

me night and day...also Richard Sinnott for his inspiration in creating the peacocks in the first place. My partner Anthony Rocanello who puts up with all my eccentricities. My studio mate Becky Hubbert, whom I share creative space with for over 20 years. I also couldn’t have been able to do this show so beautifully without the support, genius, generosity, skill and love from Barry Frier at Baobob Frames and Daniel Beauchemin at Chelsea Frames, whom I have been working with for years and years. I value their dedication and collaboration with all my heart. I am blown away by the fantastic essays by the gifted writers Karen Finley, Edward Gómez, Robert Kushner, and Carlo McCormick. Thanks to Ted and everyone at Howl! for making this possible. And last—but not least—a special thanks to the fabulous Jane Friedman for her dedication to art and beauty. –CT

Chris Tanner: Here’s Looking at You Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project September 9–30, 2018 © 2018 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! A/P/E (Howl! Archive Publishing Editions) Volume 1, No. 25 ISBN: 978-0-9995847-5-0 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. © 2018 Karen Finley © 2018 Edward Gómez © 2018 Robert Kushner © 2018 Carlo McCormick Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NY, NY 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper

The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman

Front and back cover:

Royal Flush, 2018

Beads, jewels, glitter, sand, mixed media on canvas 72 x 36 inches Inside front cover—artist’s residence:

How High the Moon, 2019

Beads, jewels, glitter, sand, mixed media on canvas 96 x 96 inches

Inside back cover—artist’s residence

Cake Walk with Liz Renay, 2009

Sequins, glitter, paillettes, hair, jewels, embroidery on silk, antique artifacts, minerals, objects, aluminum disks, ribbon, mixed media on wood

Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project www.howlarts.org / info@howlarts.org HOWL! ARTS INC. ARCHIVE / PUBLISHING / EDITIONS 6 EAST 1ST STREET, NYC 10003