In 1982, Puerto Rican artist Papo Colo installed a book-shaped sculpture in the courtyard of El Museo del Barrio in Harlem. Commissioned as part of David Hammons’s Art in the Park program, it unfurled like an accordion across a series of 8-by-4-foot plywood panels co-authored by nearly 40 invited New York artists and poets. Four decades later, seven of those panels form the basis of Octopus and Others, an exhibition that addresses the porous boundary between the word and the image within the more experimental scenes of production from the ‘80s through today.
The first panel in the exhibition is by Colo himself and gestures toward the alchemical, even transcendent possibilities unleashed through the collaboration of artists and poets across distances, languages, and generations. “English Spanish $ Spanglish,” Colo scribbles in white paint against the black-coated plywood. “Vivas poetas individuales X-formed by Colo’s ceremony into collective.”
