Collections

Collecting COLAB: Ephemera, Photography & Multiples, 1978–1985

COLAB’s ever-changing nexus of thirty to sixty artists included many who later achieved individual fame, but the group’s real contribution was the philosophy of creative engagement it advanced through collective, do-it-yourself actions.

Jane Dickson and Charlie Ahearn, Poster, Times Square Show, 1980

Sold

Silkscreen and paint on paper, 22 1/2″ x 28 1/2″. Image by Dickson; poster design by Dickson and Ahearn.

COLAB’s Times Square Show, held in June 1980 in a former massage parlor on 41st Street, included hundreds of artists from around the city. Critics proclaimed the exhibition a watershed event.

In 2012, the retrospective exhibition Time Square Show Revisited appeared at the Hunter College galleries, and was reviewed by Robert Pincus-Witten in Artforum:

“Were we to have the beer-stained napkin upon which was scrawled the brainstorming list of the participants in, say the Salon des Refusés or the first Impressionist exhibition […], imagine how precious such scraps would be. It may yet seem a stretch to equate the Times Square Show of the the spring and summer of 1980 with these epochal undertakings […], but it seems to me that the ephemera generated by this sprawling Pictures-era conclave, from handbills to broadsides to stray snapshots and videos, are infused with the same talismanic quality.”