10 SPRING 2019
EDITOR’S LETTER
Issue N
O
209It’s not difficult to understand why Lucy
Sparrow has become a bit of a rock star in recent
years. Although I absolutely love a good opening
and get excited when an artist I follow has a new
body of work to share, the urgency that you have
to be there, you need to see it, only comes around
every so often. An exhibition may speak to you, but
there are few artists who cross over into evoking
a compulsion to experience their work in person
no matter what. This is the space Lucy Sparrow
occupies. She is a must-see. It doesn’t quite make
sense, the volume, repetition and little intricacies
and individuality of seeing 30,000 pieces of art
before you. Made of felt. Not only objects made
of felt, but entire corner stores, sex shops, grocery
stores, bodegas, you name it, where every object
you have spent your life consuming and seeing
advertised, is presented, and made of felt. It’s
mesmerizing, a bit maddening really, to even begin
to consider the stamina it takes to actually make the
work, and intuitively how whip-smart Sparrow’s art-
making is. Not only is it a multi-faceted comment
on consumerism, but a challenge to what the
art-buying market really is. You may wonder, “Why
on Earth would someone do this?” But by the time
you’ve posed the question, you’ve bought a felt box
of Cheerios and had the best time doing it.Lucy Sparrow’s approach is something that,
perhaps in the past, might have raised an eyebrow
or two. Is it performance art? Conceptual art?
Art made for Instagram? A souvenir? Feminist?
Political? Of course, the answer is that it is some,
none, and all of those things. Watching thousands
of people come through Sparrow Mart at the
Juxtapoz Clubhouse in Miami in late 2018, there
didn’t seem to be one person who wanted to be
there for any of the above reasons. They wanted
to see felt. They wanted to see their childhood
memories or daily lives reimagined and
repackaged by a talented artist who also becomes
the centerpiece of the exhibit. In considering the
most polarizing performance artists of our time,
Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, or even Cindy
Sherman, finding herself to be the material of her
own work, the realization occurs that Sparrow
doesn’t fit into those categories either. I would
even argue that she is beginning to create her own
genre, one that takes the popularity of street art,
the headiness of conceptual art, and the hyper-
super-modern social media world, and turns
it into unreplicatable, original and interactive
installation art. And the best part? You can take a
little bit home with you.I love this idea of artists creating work that
ignores the fashion of the era. Emily Mae Smith,
interviewed in this issue, pointedly observes
that, “There was a whole period of time in the
past ten years in New York where if you made
representational painting, it was not cool. Nobody
was showing it. That was a weird micro-trend,
but a very strong one. It was just all abstract.”
And you know what Smith did? She adamantly
painted image-based work. She didn’t care about
the trends: she just made good work and knew
that time would tell the truth. Consider Julie
Curtiss touching on Surrealism, Neo Rauch being
a figurative painter of nearly his own genre, or
Vaughn Spann mixing abstraction and portraits
in the same exhibitions, side-by-side—it’s not
about doing what you are told, or doing what
trends say is smart and sensible. So the next
time you notice an artist doing work “off-trend,”
chances are, that artist is doing it best.Enjoy Spring 2019.Above: Lucy Sparrow, Juxtapoz Cover Art, 2019, Photo by Ian Cox