Name: Book launch 'Curtis Cuffie' (Blank Forms)
Start: 2023-10-28T16:00:00-04:00
End: 2023-10-28T17:30:00-04:00
Location: Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore

Book launch 'Curtis Cuffie' (Blank Forms)

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 is an independent bookstore, a vibrant source of timeless publications on contemporary art and the humanities. With extensive selection books on art and photo monographs, art writing, criticism and confrontational literature along with out of print titles. Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents our selections at art book fairs, witch popup stores and various online presence. The book launches, signings, lectures, and performances our bookstore has hosted over many years compliment our mission to highlight the doers and thinkers whose works we support.

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore

Please join us for a book launch of 'Curtis Cuffie' (Blank Forms) with  photographers and a curator discussing Cuffie's legacy.

<h3>Please join us for a conversation between a panel of photographers <strong>Katy Abel</strong>, <strong>Tom Warren</strong>, and art historian and curator <strong>Bonnie Yochelson</strong> discussing and honoring the late artist Curtis Cuffie’s legacy. </h3><h3>There will also be a screening of an excerpt from a documentary made by the late photographer Margaret Morton.</h3><h3></h3><h3>Saturday October 28 4pm EST</h3><h3>Pre-order a signed copy here</h3><h3>Livestream on Instagram @artbookps1</h3><p></p><p><strong>The first book on the art-world legend who installed his ephemeral sculptures on the streets of New York’s East Village</strong></p><p><strong>Curtis Cuffie</strong> (1955–2002) was an artist from Harstville, South Carolina, who found local notoriety in the 1990s for the thrilling and surprising way he adorned the streets of New York’s East Village. His on-the-spot sculptures were woven into fences, hung from walls and sprawled along the Bowery and Cooper Square.Making use of whatever he could find to fashion works that were imaginative and real, Cuffie took the street for all it could provide: materials, an audience, a rhythm and a sense of the strange unexpectedness of public life. </p><p>He was unhoused for stretches of his life, and his sculptures were viewed near to his outdoor quarters. Cuffie’s art was often removed by city sanitation, but new work would spring up soon after. Though little of his art survives today, a trove of photographs documenting it keeps him in the present.</p><p>This publication, the first on Cuffie, seeks to honor the artist and rectify his omission by going backward to recover that which has been left behind. It places Cuffie’s own photographs and those of his companion Katy Abel alongside pictures that photographers Margaret Morton and Tom Warren took of Cuffie and his art on the streets.</p><p></p><p>Edited by Scott Portnoy, Robert Snowden, Ciarán Finlayson. Text by Alan W. Moore, Ciarán Finlayson, Curtis Cuffie. Photography by Katy Abel, Carol Thompson, Curtis Cuffie, Margaret Morton, Tom Warren</p><p></p><p><strong>Blank Forms Editions, 2023</strong></p><p><strong>Paperback | 8 x 10.75 in. | 93 pgs  | 75 bw.</strong></p><p></p><p><strong>Katy Abel</strong> is a Cooper Square resident who took hundreds of snapshots of Curtis Cuffie&#x27;s art as it was seen on the streets.</p><p><strong>Tom Warren </strong> is an American photographer. Warren experienced the 1980s in New York and captured it photographically. At that time he founded several project spaces and exhibited regularly. He was a significant part of the New York art scene and gained notoriety for his artistic repurposing of vacant spaces in the East Village. With his portraits of the people and life of New York, he created memories and documents of these times.</p><p><strong>Bonnie Yochelson</strong> is an art historian and curator specializing in photography. Yochelson  has written numerous books about New York photographers, organized exhibitions at art museums, history museums and commercial and non-profit galleries, and was on the faculty of the MFA Department of Photography, Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts from 1988 to 2017. </p><p><strong>Margaret Morton</strong> (1948-2020) was a gifted photographer who chronicled the lives and ingenuity of homeless people. In 1989, Morton began documenting the improvised housing created by people living in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park. In the decades that followed, she built a remarkable record of how people live and survive at the edge of a society that overlooks them. Her photographs have appeared in numerous publications, including <em>The New York Times</em>, <em>The Washington Post</em>, and <em>The Atlantic</em>, and her works have been shown in dozens of solo and group exhibitions. </p>

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Book launch 'Curtis Cuffie' (Blank Forms)

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