Research Archive

John Fekner and Don Leicht were invited to participate in the outdoor street exhibition Welling Court Mural Project organized by Ad Hoc Art in Queens, NY. After a preliminary visit to the site, they decided to paint on a wall directly facing the Two Coves Community Garden and the NYCHA Astoria Houses Development.  The location of their collaborative site-specific work was important for two reasons: not only did it connect with the communities’ thriving volunteer-run urban garden; it also provided a platform to address the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Read the rest of this entry »

John Fekner & John Crash Matos

John Crash Matos, a graffiti artist, and I collaborated on a project entitled THE SUFFOLK STREET FALLOUT SHELTER. The mural, painted on an abandoned building on the Lower East Side, depicts a nuclear bomb exploding in the New York City. A stenciled warning in English and Spanish reads: IN CASE OF NUCLEAR WAR STEP INSIDE/EN CASO DE GUERRA NULCEAR ENTREN. Read the rest of this entry »

Fekner visits Fashion Moda in 1979 which leads to his installation of NO TV/READ which is simultaneously shown at P. S. 1 and Galerie S:t Petri -Archive of Experimental and Marginal Art in Lund, Sweden. In the window of Fashion Moda, Fekner creates an installation with a TV set, a stenciled logo and a statement in both English and Spanish in February 1980. Read the rest of this entry »

“As a painter, act as the eye of the community, for the community.”

“In the 70s, I made a conscious choice of changing the formal aesthetics I was taught in art school. No longer interested in working within the spatial restrictions of a white canvas, I embraced the outdoors, reducing the value of an art object to that of a shared visual experience for the general public. At the same time, the formal ‘blankness’ of a typical gallery, devoid of any distinctive character, no longer held interest for me.”

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Group Show @ PS1

That Was Then…This Is Now

June 22 – September 24 2008
Organized by P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss

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Where have all the clunkers gone?
Once the junk is removed,
progress will be defined only
by the limits of the human spirit.
And as always, for now and the forever,
growth will always supersede decay.

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Gorman Park, also known as 85th St. Park, is among the first locations in New York to have street art/graffiti/stencils. The words Itchyoo Park were painted in large white letters on the front of the parkhouse in 1968. Additional street works were seen here in 1969 and again in 1977, 78 and throughout the 80s.

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