06.04.2024 – 01.06.2024
Curtis Cuffie was an artist who lived in the East Village of New York City. Originally from Hartsville, South Carolina, he moved to Brooklyn at the age of fifteen and eventually settled in Manhattan, first near Bryant Park and later in the Bowery, where he lived homeless for much of his life.
Until the end of his life in 2002, Cuffie published hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mysterious, improbable works of art on the streets of New York. To do so, he fished from the city’s detritus and dressed them in raging assemblages of discarded objects, fabrics and ordinary things that tell of what we are. There was hardly an end to these works: things came and went, materials were adapted and changed, and works were regularly destroyed by street cleaners and the police. Little of it has survived. As a result, viewing Cuffie’s sculptures today is usually a second-hand encounter, filtered through the perspectives of those who photographed them, be they friends or lovers, artists or unknown passers-by.
The exhibition, curated by Tom Engels in collaboration with Robert Snowden, comprises around seven hundred photographs from the 1990s and is brought to life by a series of analogue slide projectors.
Curtis Cuffie’s New York City
06.04.2024 – 01.06.2024
Grazer Kunstverein
Burggasse 4
8010 Graz, Styria
www.grazerkunstverein.org
