Cianciolo said she chose the participants, who include past collaborators and former and current students, by looking around her house and asking, “Who are the artists that we live with? And what designers do I love that maybe are hard for people to get their hands on? I focused on every single thing [being] a one-off, too, so there was a thread between everything.” Some artists have pulled objects from their archives, others have made work for OAF. Asked what brief she gave her collaborators, Cianciolo replied: “I said I’m curating a booth in the spirit of Run Store in 2001. This surrealist kind of store was happening in an abandoned storefront, but it’s also a performance and, within that, my own interior.”
Outsider is a description often applied to Cianciolo’s work, usually as a synonym for independent. The artist has never worried about fitting into any particular box, and the joy she’s feeling is about (re)connection. “It’s funny, working with artists, we’re all so wild and different and funny,” she mused. “[I’m] being reminded, too, that those are the things in life that I value, being an artist myself.”
Nostalgia is part and parcel of any revival project. Cianciolo says she’s ventured down memory lane but only a little way, as she considers this edition of Run Store to be a new venture, in which elements of the past are moved forward to the present. Outside of Cianciolo’s actual home and the cozy environs she’s creating at OAF, the times are fraught. Is it possible that there is any resonance between then and now? Cianciolo thinks there is. The “energy of love” for those who are present and those who have passed is the connecting glue. “I personally feel that all we have right now to hold onto is like that word, L-O-V-E, that feeling, that energy. I would say that’s what this project is.”
The Outsider Art Fair, at the Metropolitan Pavilion, runs from March 19 to 22.
Casey Byrnes, tunic
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Photo: Courtesy of Outsider Art Fair
Photo: Courtesy of Outsider Art Fair