Kenneth Goldsmith

9 January 2009 - 21 February 2009
Opening Reception 9 January 2009 8pm

Front Gallery:

Street Poets & Visionaries: Selections From The Ubuweb Collection

Talk by UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith at 7PM preceding the opening reception at 8PM.

Street Poets & Visionaries: Selections from the UbuWeb Collection, an exhibition of posters and ephemeral writings from the streets of New York City.

In the tradition of Jim Shaw’s “Thrift Shop Paintings,” this collection of street posters, mad scribblings, political screeds, religious rants, and paranoid raves expands our notion of the Outsider arts to include the written word.

Formally striking, emotionally charged, and bizarre beyond belief, these graphical works dovetail with the historic traditions of concrete poetry and art brut. Seamlessly melding text and image, their obsessive quality evokes Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger’s visionary works.

Featured in the exhibition will be the work of David Daniels (1933-2008), a Bay Area poet who created a complex body of work including visual poems using only Microsoft Word. Works from two of his epic series, “The Gates of Paradise” and “Years” will be featured.

UbuWeb (ubu.com) is the Internet’s largest resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts, featuring thousands of MP3s, films, books, scholarly papers, and poems.