NYAB Event - “NOTHING IS NOT READY: The Artists’ Books of Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Press 1963

“NOTHING IS NOT READY: The Artists’ Books of Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Press 1963 – 2013” Exhibition

Printed Matter, Inc.

This event has ended.

Printed Matter presents the exhibit NOTHING IS NOT READY: The Artists’ Books of Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Press 1963 – 2013.

Founded by Peter Schumann in 1963 on New York’s Lower East Side, the Bread and Puppet Theater is an experimental and political puppet theater, which produces performances from small scale staged pieces to large outdoor pageants with over a hundred participants. Based on principles of a lived fusion of art and activism, the theater has been a familiar presence in street demonstrations since the Anti-Vietnam War movement. Bread and Puppet has resided in Vermont since 1970, currently on a former dairy farm, where the 130 year old barn has been converted into a vast puppet museum.

Peter Schumann’s graphics are a fundamental component of the Bread and Puppet Theater’s distinctive aesthetic and the production of books and book-like works have been an integral – if often over-looked – component of Schumann’s prodigious artistic output. Through a broad range of publications, including mini “Bread and Puppet Newspapers” (which were hawked by puppeteers on Astor Place and Washington Square Park in the 1960’s), to hybrid artists’ book/theater programs, to oversized unique constructions with cardboard covers, the book form has had an enduring presence in Bread and Puppet’s many activities.

Often narrative in form, Schumann’s books and booklets deploy metaphor, metonym and other tropes to create stories and parables that celebrate both the ridiculous and the sublime. While referencing picture and comic books, there is also a Brechtian distancing effect in the play between image and text. Didacticism and allegory interact with the nonsensical and carnivalesque.

The exhibition NOTHING IS NOT READY will feature Schumann’s recent extraordinary output of artists publications, mostly small and often scrappy booklets – over 200 titles in the last several years. Photocopied and staple-bound, these book works were produced in series that run in the dozens and scores of “volumes”: the “No-x-mas Series”, “Kasper Comix & Tragix”, “Jingle Books”, “How-To Pamphlets”, and “the Downsized Novel Corporation” to name the most abundant.

A broad selection of out-of-print publications dating back to the early 1960’s will also be exhibited, as well as limited edition letterpress artists’ books from the Bread and Puppet Press and the Janus Press of Newark, Vermont. In total, well over 400 artists’ books and booklets will be on display, with many available for sale. In addition, a selection of popular Bread and Puppet posters will also be on display and available for sale. And finally, a window installation of puppets and books will be collaboratively designed by members of Bread and Puppet and Printed Matter’s staff and interns. The exhibition is being curated by Printed Matter’s Associate Director, Max Schumann, who has been with the organization for 24 years, and who is also Peter Schumann’s son.

NOTHING IS NOT READY is being presented on the occasion of Bread and Puppet’s 50th anniversary, making it one of the longest running independent Theaters in the world today. It also runs concurrent with a major exhibition of Schumann’s art work at the Queens Museum of Art; the staging of a recent Bread and Puppet Theater piece, Shatterer of Worlds, at the West Park Presbyterian Church at 165 West 86th St, November 7 – 24; and a screening of films celebrating Bread and Puppet’s 50th anniversary at Anthology Film Archives.