Revisiting Collaborative Projects Inc. (COLAB): Ephemera 1978–1985

“Young artists who arrived in New York in the 1970s confronted a depressing reality, says Marc Miller of Gallery 98. “The city teetered on bankruptcy; housing was either too expensive or too decrepit and dangerous; and the art world they hoped to conquer was in fact small, elitist, and already flooded with artists from the previous generation.”

Something had to give. It did. Artists would do it themselves. At the heart of this change was Collaborative Projects Inc. (COLAB). Founded in 1978 to enable artists to take advantage of new government grants. COLAB artists held exhibitions like the Manifesto Show (1979), the Real Estate Show (1980) and the Times Square Show (1980). They created art spaces like Fashion Moda in the South Bronx (1978–93), ABC No Rio in the Lower East Side (1980–present), and the sequence of pop-up A More Stores (early 1980s).

 

Tom Warren’s 1981 “portrait studio” at ABC No Rio, an interactive exhibition, provided professional-quality portraits to local residents at a negligible price. The resulting images functioned both as personal mementos for the subjects and as components in a cumulative portrait of the community.

Warren made very few prints from the negatives he kept. Recognizing their historical value, he recently returned to the negatives to create two photo-composites, “Portrait Studio: No Rio Locals” and “Portrait Studio: COLAB Artists.” Each of the digital prints has been signed by Warren.

Warren was a member of the artists group Collaborative Projects, Inc. (COLAB), many of whose members were involved with ABC No Rio in the Lower East Side and Fashion Moda in the South Bronx (where Warren set up a subsequent portrait studio in 1982). It’s no surprise that many of these artists took advantage of Warren’s services. Warren first isolated the portraits of COLAB artists for a COLAB exhibition in Europe.

 

 

 

Many artists found that exhibiting in the South Bronx challenged them to redefine the purpose of their art and inspired them to explore new ways of working. This poster is for Jane Dickson’s “City Maze” exhibition where, with the collaboration of local graffiti artists and school children, she created a maze installation that had special appeal for the youth of the neighborhood. A video of the exhibition is posted on Youtube.

 

Fashion Moda Presents GAS (Graffiti Art Success for America), Curated by Johnny CRASH Matos, Poster and Press Release, 1980

One of Fashion Moda’s most significant contributions was its role in connecting the graffiti artists living in the city’s boroughs with the downtown fine arts world. This poster embodies a key moment in this important history. It publicizes GAS, the very first graffiti show at Fashion Moda held in October 1980. Organized by Johnny CRASH Matos, GAS featured Futura, John Fekner, Lady Pink, Lee, Zephyr and other leading street artists. Like all the posters featured at Gallery 98, this is an original from the period.

 

COLAB broke new ground when on New Year’s eve 1980 artists associated with the group illegally squatted a city-owned building on Delancey Street and mounted The Real Estate Show, an exhibition about housing and real estate exploitation. The guerrilla exhibition was the catalyst for the birth of the art space ABC No Rio when a city agency helped end the building seizure by bargaining with the artists and giving them control of a smaller building at nearby 156 Rivington Street. The confrontational spirit of The Real Estate Show is evident in this work by Robin Winters. It was originally made in the late-1970s when Winters enlarged with distortions a small hand-lettered sign that he found posted in the neighborhood. For The Real Estate Show he photocopied it and distributed it as a poster circular. Like many downtown artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Winters made his Xerox prints at Todd’s Copy Shop on Mott Street run by the artist Todd Jurgenson.

 

COLAB’s Times Square Show, held in June 1980 in a former massage parlor on 41st Street, included hundreds of artists from around the city. Critics proclaimed the exhibition a watershed event.

In 2012, the retrospective exhibition Time Square Show Revisited appeared at the Hunter College galleries, and was reviewed by Robert Pincus-Witten in Artforum:

“Were we to have the beer-stained napkin upon which was scrawled the brainstorming list of the participants in, say the Salon des Refusés or the first Impressionist exhibition […], imagine how precious such scraps would be. It may yet seem a stretch to equate the Times Square Show of the the spring and summer of 1980 with these epochal undertakings […], but it seems to me that the ephemera generated by this sprawling Pictures-era conclave, from handbills to broadsides to stray snapshots and videos, are infused with the same talismanic quality.”

 

This shopping bag was made for The A. More Store that COLAB organized in December 1980 in a rented storefront on Broome Street in Soho. The store followed the model of the COLAB gift shop at the Times Square Show that had operated a few months earlier in June 1980. The group continued to organize similar stores featuring artist-made, low price multiples designed to have broad popular appeal at different locations over the next few years often using the name The A. More Store.

 

“The A. More Stores” organized by COLAB in the early 1980s featured artist-made, low-priced multiples designed to have broad popular appeal. Often the stores opened in conjunction with the holiday gift-buying season and many artists created Christmas tree ornaments.

 

The brilliant Gallery 98 tells the COLAB story by means of ephemera (posters, flyers, and promotional material), photographic portraits of COLAB members, and a few art multiples that illustrate the group’s populist aesthetics and political concerns. See it and buy items from the movement here.