The small but fascinating Richard McGuire exhibit at downtown New York City’s Alden Projects has been extended through November 18th. If you aren’t really familiar with the street art that the New Jersey-born visionary multidisciplinary artist and comics creator produced during the late 1970s and early 1980s—newsprint graphic work he’d wheatpasted all over the Lower East Side, wildly dynamic show fliers, and more—a trip to Orchard Street during the course of this month will do you some good. (A bigger show in Connecticut features sculptures, too.)
At NYC arts and politics paper The Brooklyn Rail, Megan N. Liberty writes about the exhibitions and the new monograph that accompanies the Alden Projects show, declaring McGuire “an artist of the everyday.” Here’s Liberty:
The diversity of Richard McGuire’s work is surprising; from his illustrations for The New Yorker and McSweeney’s and published graphic novels Here (2014) and Sequential Drawings (2016) that treat the book as a sculptural object—something I’ve argued in a previous review of Here—to his musical and performance career as a founding member of the post-punk band Liquid Liquid, McGuire’s artistic output is multidisciplinary. Richard McGuire: Art For The Street 1978 – 1982, published to accompany the show of the same title at Alden Projects, NY, adds a new layer to this impressive body of work, detailing his early years enmeshed in the performance and street art scene exhibiting work in museums and galleries alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Harring, with whom he became friends, and on the street alongside Jenny Holzer’s Truisms and SAMO© poetry.
Read the whole piece at The Brooklyn Rail. Back in 2014, I wrote about McGuire’s graphic novel Here at my site.
Artists-editors Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman launched an avant garde anthology magazine called RAW in 1980 that focused largely on comics, but featured other visual art, all the work of globally sourced contributors.