Pulp fiction

A video of a man belly-crawling his way through New York City, rare comic books, prints by Kerry James Marshall, and issues of the Anti-Fascist Front Magazine—these are just a few of the 65 objects and artworks on display in Black Pulp!, a show up at 32 Edgewood Avenue until Mar. 11. William Villalongo, artist and lecturer at the Yale School of Art, and Mark Gibson, ART ’13, curated the show. By displaying the work of black artists and publishers, as well as non-black artists and publishers “allied with foregrounding the black experience,” as the press release for the show explains, Pulp! aims to “challenge racist narratives and change limited notions of black experience.” The show is ambitious, and the expansive range of its content merits multiple visits to the gallery.

The idea for this multimedia exhibit arose from discussions between Villalongo and Gibson, sparked by Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” project in 2014. In that show, Walker created a giant, sugar-coated sculpture in the old Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn. “Mark and I were floored by how wild and over the top it was,” Villalongo recalled in an email to me. “The aggressiveness and subversiveness of the expression led us to start questioning it as a sort of ‘pulp’ attitude which can be defined as a lurid, satirical and absurd, most readily found in comics and pulp fiction.” When Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale School of Art, asked the faculty for Edgewood Gallery show proposals, Villalongo saw it as a chance to turn musings into a reality. (READ MORE)