Kiki Smith, ABC No Rio The Island of Negative Utopia, Silkscreen on Cloth, Signed & Numbered, 1984

Kiki Smith, “ABC No Rio The Island of Negative Utopia,” silk screened black ink on cloth, number 51 from an edition of 70, signed numbered and date 1984, 26 x 20 inches.

Kiki Smith regularly exhibited at No Rio and created this limited edition print to help raise money for the printing of COLAB’s 1985 book ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery. Noteworthy for its creative use of typography, this silkscreen on cloth is a variation of the poster she created for “ABC No Rio, Island of Negative Utopia,” an exhibition about the gallery held at the Kitchen in 1984.

Kiki Smith’s silk -screened print “Isle of Negative Utopia” was originally designed as a poster for the multi-media ABC No Rio exhibition Isle of Negative Utopia held from February  1–5, 1983 at the Kitchen, an alternative space in Soho. Smith did this variation of the motif, without the show information and printed on cloth, about a year and a half later specifically to help raise money for the printing of the ABC No Rio book.   The many prints and multiples that Smith made during her years associated with the artist group Colab forms a major section in Wendy Weitman’s catalogue Kiki Smith: Prints, Books and Things, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004