NYAB Event - John Evans, Buster Cleveland and Scarlatina Lust “LOISAIDADA”

John Evans, Buster Cleveland and Scarlatina Lust “LOISAIDADA”

Pavel Zoubok Gallery

[Image: John Evans (1932-2012) "September 1, 1985" (1985) mixed-media collage, 11 x 8 1/2 in.]

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Featuring works from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, LOISAIDADA: John Evans, Buster Cleveland and Scarlatina Lust focuses on three neighbors who engaged in a complex artistic exchange during a transformative period on the Lower East Side.

Taken from the rubber-stamped portmanteau that appears throughout the exhibition, LOISAIDADA examines the resurgence of anti-commercialism in the largely black and Puerto Rican neighborhood known as Loisada. Extending a visual culture that reaches back to the early 20th Century, these collages celebrate spontaneity, yet they represent serial practices that fostered collaboration among an international network of artists. Favoring intimacy and absurdity over authorship and originality, these artists formed a tributary in anti-art practice, where changing demographics converged with Neo-Dada and Fluxus strategies.

While Buster Cleveland and Scarlatina Lust distributed their postcards, stamps and flyers across the world, John Evans received and synthesized printed matter from New York’s globe-spanning cultures. Scan-bed ready 8 ½ x 11-inch collages by Cleveland and Lust were created to be resized, Xeroxed, perforated and stamped, engaging chance operations through inconsistencies of color and composition. Integrating eclectic detritus with a signature mix of watercolor and ink, happenstance played a role in Evans’s daily collages as well. Like those who discarded them, the flotsam in Evans’s work speaks in many languages and tells many stories. In addition to individual collages, LOISAIDADA will present a selection of Evans’ collages from 1976-1985 in the artist’s beloved Aclé bindings.

John Evans (1932-2012) received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1968 and immediately moved to New York. Notable solo exhibitions include “New York Diary: The Collages of John Evans” at the New–York Historical Society, “John Evans: Collages” at the Morris Museum, as well as exhibitions at Cordier & Ekstrom, Knoedler, Gracie Mansion and Pavel Zoubok galleries. A major survey of his work, John Evans: Collages, was published by the Quantuck Lane Press in 2004.

Buster Cleveland (1943-1998) studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Art Institute. He was instrumental in organizing Inter DADA 80 and Inter DADA 84, in Ukiah and San Francisco, CA, respectively. He has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and his work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, NY, The Walker Art Center, MN and the University of Iowa, IA, among others.

Judy Speezak (aka Scarlatina Lust, b. 1954) is a self-taught artist who cut her teeth on Chicago’s North Side, where she helped develop the nascent punk rock scene. Speezak moved to New York in 1977 and, from 1978 to 1981, co-published SMEGMA The Magazine with Alexander Hirka, which showcased her own collages alongside works by numerous East Village and international mail artists. Copies of STM are archived at The Museum of Modern Art, NY and university libraries nationwide. Speezak’s mail art has been exhibited in group exhibitions worldwide. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.