El Museo del Barrio is proud to present Octopus & Others: Acts of Collaboration & Poetics, an exhibition inspired by a significant project from the museum’s history by artist, poet, and Exit Art co-founder Papo Colo. Octopus: An Act of Sculpture (1982)—an accordion-style outdoor book composed of eight-by-four-foot plywood panels—was first staged in El Museo’s courtyard in 1982. Anchored by a recent gift of several panels from the project to El Museo’s Permanent Collection by Colo, presented here for the first time in more than four decades, Octopus & Others showcases the power of collaboration between artists and poets and of artworks that embrace and subvert the book form and its function.
Each “page” of Octopus was made onsite by an artist and/or poet from New York City’s uptown and downtown scenes that Colo invited to contribute. The resulting participatory sculpture represents an anthology of the various currents in poetry and art of New York’s artistic ecosystem of the early 1980s. Participants included writers and poets such as Nicholasa Mohr and Pedro Pietri, alongside artists Vito Acconci, Tehching Hsieh, and Juan Sánchez, among others. Octopus not only reflected Exit Art’s interdisciplinary and multicultural ethos, but the project also underscores El Museo’s role within New York’s alternative cultural network and its longstanding commitment to experimentation, innovation, and cultural exchange.
Taking Colo’s transformation of the book into sculpture and public action as its point of departure, Octopus & Others brings together cross-generational contributions of artists and poets that share its collaborative ethos. Through a grouping of collection works, archival materials, and select loans, the exhibition also considers how artists have embraced and reconsidered the book form in response to shared social, political, and environmental concerns.
The exhibition is curated by El Museo del Barrio’s Assistant Curator, Zuna Maza.