December 8, 2016

In honor of the exhibition Toyo Tsuchiya Invisible Underground and the publication of Rivington School: 80s New York Underground, Howl! Happening is pleased to present the launch of a new book celebrating the Rivington School. Iconoclastic and populist, the Rivington School is an outgrowth of the No Se No social club and gallery founded in 1983 by “Cowboy” Ray Kelly, a one-time farmer from Texas, who maintained that “anyone can be an artist,” that everything is a work of art. The School was also the origin of the Rivington Sculpture Garden, a guerrilla sculpture space containing the massive, welded metal junk sculpture that the group has become known for.

A vortex of creativity, Rivington School artists devised ways to live, create art, and exhibit with very little money and virtually no media attention. As David Dalton says in his essay for Tsuchiya’s catalog, “It was a scene so underground that it never came up for air.”

December 8, 2016 / 6 PM
R.U.O.K. OR WAT?
Rivington School: 80s New York Underground
Publication Party
Join editor Istvan Kantor for an evening celebrating the new tome including a ritual book burning of the first copy by Monty Cantsin accompanied by Angel Eyedealism, as well as Rivington School contributors, and Black Dog publisher Duncan McCorquodale from London.
Rivington School: 80s New York Underground documents the work of the Rivington School group of artists that emerged during the turbulent 80s in the heart of the Lower East Side. The RS set an internationally important precedent for contemporary alternative practice. The book explores the underground scene that formed around this group of artists, named after an abandoned public school building on Rivington Street. Here, like-minded street artists, sculptors and performers set about to create works that refuted and challenged an increasingly commercialized art world.