Nothing Is: Sun Ra and Others' Covers
Starting in the 1960s, extraterrestrial-American musician, composer, and thinker Sun Ra and his band the Arkestra began decorating their own record covers. Partially as an economical way to make small batches of LPs for sale at their concerts, and partly as a continuation of their pioneering DIY activity with their artist-run record label Saturn Records, Ra and his cohorts would gather together, using colored pens, pencils, paints, and collage to design unique jackets for their albums, offering them to the audience from the edge of the stage at the set break or after the show. The rarest of these used fragments of shower curtains from the legendary Sun Ra house in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in their elaborate collaged designs. These covers are of course now prized fetish objects. Many of them were compiled in the book Sun Ra: Art on Saturn: The Album Cover Art of Sun Ra鈥檚 Saturn Label (Fantagraphics, 2022), which situated the handmade covers in context with their more commercially (however still small-batch) produced, offset-printed counterparts.
In Nothing Is, organized by John Corbett and Albert Oehlen for the JUBG in K枚ln and Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago, a wide range of contemporary artists from varying locations and backgrounds is invited to make their own handmade record covers for specific Sun Ra LPs, whether actual or fictional. The show takes its title from a Ra poem (itself reprinted on the ESP LP called Nothing Is):
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Starting in the 1960s, extraterrestrial-American musician, composer, and thinker Sun Ra and his band the Arkestra began decorating their own record covers. Partially as an economical way to make small batches of LPs for sale at their concerts, and partly as a continuation of their pioneering DIY activity with their artist-run record label Saturn Records, Ra and his cohorts would gather together, using colored pens, pencils, paints, and collage to design unique jackets for their albums, offering them to the audience from the edge of the stage at the set break or after the show. The rarest of these used fragments of shower curtains from the legendary Sun Ra house in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in their elaborate collaged designs. These covers are of course now prized fetish objects. Many of them were compiled in the book Sun Ra: Art on Saturn: The Album Cover Art of Sun Ra鈥檚 Saturn Label (Fantagraphics, 2022), which situated the handmade covers in context with their more commercially (however still small-batch) produced, offset-printed counterparts.
In Nothing Is, organized by John Corbett and Albert Oehlen for the JUBG in K枚ln and Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago, a wide range of contemporary artists from varying locations and backgrounds is invited to make their own handmade record covers for specific Sun Ra LPs, whether actual or fictional. The show takes its title from a Ra poem (itself reprinted on the ESP LP called Nothing Is):
Artists on show
- Aaron Curry
- Adam Pendleton
- Allen Ruppersberg
- Amy Sillman
- Andre Butzer
- Andreas Breunig
- Andy Hope 1930
- Brian Calvin
- Cameron Jamie
- Caroline Thomas
- Cary Lauren
- Cauleen Smith
- Celeste Rapone
- Chris Martin
- Christina Forrer
- Christopher Williams
- Cornelius Quabeck
- Damon Locks
- Daniel Richter
- Dennis Tyfus
- Ed Ruscha
- Ellen Berkenblit
- Emil Schult
- Felix Kubin
- Günter Tuzina
- Hedwig Eberle
- Jason Moran
- Jens-Uwe Beyer
- Jinn Bronwen Lee
- John Harten
- John Sparagana
- Josiah McElheny
- Jutta Koether
- Kim Gordon
- Kim Hiorthøy
- Lasse Marhaug
- Lui Shtini
- Luke Calzonetti
- Lutz Driessen
- Magalie Guérin
- Marcus Jahmal
- Mark Booth
- Markus Oehlen
- Matthias Schaufler
- Michaela Eichwald
- Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
- Omar Velázquez
- Paul McCarthy
- Peter Fengler
- Philip Hanson
- Rachel Harrison
- Rebecca Morris
- Rebecca Warren
- Richard Hull
- Richard Prince
- Ricky Swallow
- Rosa Barba
- Roscoe Mitchell
- Stefan Marx
- Stefan Müller
- Sun Ra
- Sven-Ake Johansson
- Terry Winters
- Tim Berresheim
- Toby Ziegler
- Trenton Doyle Hancock
- Wolfgang Voigt
