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August 26 - November 25, 2007
This exhibition will feature over 80 examples of 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century ephemeral advertising sheets known as broadsides, from the collection of Los Angeles-based performer, scholar, and collector, Ricky Jay. Mr. Jay is considered one of the world’s great sleight of hand artists, and is a respected author, actor, and consultant. His holdings constitute one of the most unusual collections of these playbills in the world. The majority of the pieces in this exhibition are thought to be unique. The subjects of these broadsides mirror the unusual and fantastical interests of Jay, with an emphasis on remarkable entertainers and visual deceptions. Many of these works are featured in Jay’s book Extraordinary Exhibitions, which explores a mix of “sensational, scientific, satisfying, silly, and startling attractions” ranging from an armless dulcimer player and a singing mouse, to an equestrian bee-keeper and a mermaid.
This exhibition will feature over 80 examples of 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century ephemeral advertising sheets known as broadsides, from the collection of Los Angeles-based performer, scholar, and collector, Ricky Jay. Mr. Jay is considered one of the world’s great sleight of hand artists, and is a respected author, actor, and consultant. His holdings constitute one of the most unusual collections of these playbills in the world. The majority of the pieces in this exhibition are thought to be unique. The subjects of these broadsides mirror the unusual and fantastical interests of Jay, with an emphasis on remarkable entertainers and visual deceptions. Many of these works are featured in Jay’s book Extraordinary Exhibitions, which explores a mix of “sensational, scientific, satisfying, silly, and startling attractions” ranging from an armless dulcimer player and a singing mouse, to an equestrian bee-keeper and a mermaid.
Sunday Sep 23, 2pm
Exhibition Walk Through
With Allegra Pesenti, Associate Curator, Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts
Exhibition Walk Through
With Allegra Pesenti, Associate Curator, Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts
Saturday Nov 17, 7pmRicky Jay & Art Spiegelman
Ricky Jay is a celebrated sleight-of-hand artist and a famously engaging performer on stage and screen. While pursuing this career, Jay has also cultivated a more private role, that of the inquisitive scholar and passionate collector. Through years of research, he has assembled an astonishing archive of printed ephemera on spectacles and magic-related exhibitions. In Extraordinary Exhibitions: Broadsides from the Collection of Ricky Jay, the Hammer Museum presents a selection of broadsides, playbills, and posters from Jay's holdings.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his masterful Holocaust narrative Maus, Art Spiegelman is one of the world's best-known comic artists. A noted figure in the world of underground comics, Spiegelman, with his wife Francoise Mouly, founded the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine RAW. His most recent book, In the Shadow of No Towers, was published in 2004.
Tuesday Nov 20, 7pm
Lecture
Fringe Entertainments: Ricky Jay's Extraordinary Exhibitions Cast Into Doubtful Company
Lecture with Renny Pritikin. Pritikin was the director of New Langton Arts in the 80s and chief curator of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the 90s, both in San Francisco. He currently is director of the Nelson Gallery at UC Davis. He is known for bringing popular and material culture into the museum context, organizing retrospectives of the Southern California car culture figure Ed Big Daddy Roth, Blade Runner designer Syd Mead, the first US showing of George Lucas' Star Wars archive, curating the work of tattoo legend Don Ed Hardy, for the Cuenca Bienal, and three exhibitions with Ricky Jay's collection.
Lecture
Fringe Entertainments: Ricky Jay's Extraordinary Exhibitions Cast Into Doubtful Company
Lecture with Renny Pritikin. Pritikin was the director of New Langton Arts in the 80s and chief curator of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the 90s, both in San Francisco. He currently is director of the Nelson Gallery at UC Davis. He is known for bringing popular and material culture into the museum context, organizing retrospectives of the Southern California car culture figure Ed Big Daddy Roth, Blade Runner designer Syd Mead, the first US showing of George Lucas' Star Wars archive, curating the work of tattoo legend Don Ed Hardy, for the Cuenca Bienal, and three exhibitions with Ricky Jay's collection.
Above: Spelterini’s Sapient Pig, c. 1830 (detail). Inset: Spelterini’s Living Ass, c. 1830 (detail).