For his 1972 multiple Artball Playing Cards, Don Celender grafted the heads of various art world figures onto the bodies of football players. Here’s a card for the artist Öyvind Fahlström.
The webstore of Half Letter Press is now carrying the limited publication I made for the Don Celender exhibition. Click the photo to be taken to HLP’s site.
By Public Collectors Chicago, IL, Public Collectors, 2009
Pages: mixed formats, 31 total
Dimensions: 8.5” X 11” folio with mixed inserts
Cover: Paper
Binding: Hand-folded brochure with stapled booklet and paper-clipped inserts
This very small edition folio of materials, housed in a plastic sleeve, accompanied an exhibition of 11 books by the late conceptual artist Don Celender at the recently founded Public Collectors Study Center in Chicago. The folio includes a cardstock cover, a 20 page booklet with an essay on Celender by Marc Fischer and a synopsis for each book in the show, a color postcard, a full length version of Celender’s CV, 2 facsimile pages from Celender’s book Opinions of Working People on the Arts and a copy of Celender’s obituary from the New York Times.
Greetings from snow-covered Chicago.
Despite all the white stuff, this week will be the last opportunity to check out Don Celender: 11 Books, at Public Collectors Study Center.
I have added a second day of hours for those who might be immobilized on Wednesday.
Final viewing hours are:
Wednesday, February 10, 5-8 PM
Friday, February 12, 1-4 PM
Hours end sharply at 8 PM and 4 PM on both nights so please arrive to allow enough time for your visit.
About Don Celender:
When Don Celender died in 2005, he left behind an unusually focused and accessible body of work that is ripe for rediscovery. Many younger audiences and those who did not see his solo exhibitions (almost all presented in New York), or have yet to encounter his books (mostly self-published and hard to find) are unfamiliar with this underrated Conceptual artist.
Celender lived most of his life in St. Paul, Minnesota where he taught Art History and chaired the Art department at Macalester College for over forty years. Celender’s books and exhibits most frequently took the form of collected results from surveys. These surveys, often printed on official Macalester College stationary, were primarily conducted through the mail. Despite a great deal of writing about social practices and participatory artworks in recent years, mentions of Don Celender’s many survey projects, all dependent on the voices and participation of others, are absent from this critical discourse. Rather than taking his Ph.D. and retreating into the most obscure recesses of research and academia, Celender often used his deep knowledge of art history and his concern with art’s place in society to create a playful and humorous engagement with art and culture that could be accessible to a broad range of readers. This is the first survey of Celender’s work to be presented in Chicago.
Visitors to the exhibit will be able to pick up a free limited edition folio with materials on Celender published by Public Collectors.
Address information and other details here.
Tonight is the debut of the Public Collectors Study Center. If you live in Chicago and feel like braving the snow tonight, the first exhibition: Don Celender: 11 Books will be on view from 5:00 - 8:00 PM. I made a free folio of materials on Celender for the show. You can download a PDF of the booklet from the folio here. Just so you know, it’s 27.4 megs.
A sample page from Don Celender’s 1975 self-published book of survey results Opinions of Working People Concerning the Arts. This book is one of eleven by Celender that will be on view at the newly founded Public Collectors Study Center in Chicago, starting on Wednesday, December 9th from 5:00 - 8:00 PM. More information here.
Museum Piece by Don Celender. Self-published, 1975. For this book of survey results, Celender wrote to museums around the world and requested photos of their loading dock - always the most unspectacular architectural detail of these often grandiose structures. The publication includes correspondence from each institution and, when they complied, photos of both the loading dock and the more typical postcard view of the front of the building.
Scanned from the self-published book Destiny of a Name by Don Celender, 1978. Celender was a criminally overlooked conceptual artist with a great sense of humor. From the introduction, Celender writes:
It has been an historical fact that in certain times and in various countries of the world, surnames were descriptive of occupations. However, in the United States of America, considering the time between the great migration from abroad to America’s shores at the turn of the 20th century and the present, this phenomena has been lost.
This survey was conducted to attempt to establish remaining, or broken, connections between the family name and its logical consequence. The study was confined to the United States of America.
