Susan Cianciolo, an artist and teacher who was a central figure in New York’s downtown indie fashion scene in the 1990s, has been invited to curate a booth at the Outsider Art Fair (OAF). Those unfamiliar with her work might recognize her face, as she regularly models in the shows of friends and former students, including Eckhaus Latta and Maryam Nassir Zadeh.
When Cianciolo started out 30 years ago—her label, Run, was active from 1995 to 2001—New York was a grittier place and her practice was likewise scrappy. “I would just run around and find weird abandoned spaces,” she remembers. “I wasn’t following what was typically happening at that time with fashion.” Run 6, for example, was held in a parking garage, and a later show took place at Lady Mendl’s Tea Salon, with models serving chocolate truffles made from a family recipe. One distinguishing aspect of the Run collectsions was their collaborative nature, from start to finish. “We made everything by hand and did the production,” Cianciolo explains, “so it became like a sewing circle in the sense that all kinds of people would come and help.”
The 11th and final Run collectsion, called Run Store, was presented in New York in 2000 and in Paris in 2001, and Cianciolo describes it as having a surrealist edge. For the Outsider Art Fair, the artist is reanimating the Run Home concept and has invited 44 friends to contribute objects for sale. These pieces, like a chair from SC103 and a stool from Cianciolo’s own home, will range in price from $50 to $10,000.
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. Cianciolo said she told collaborators that she was 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. What she calls the “energy of love” for those who are present and those who have passed is the glue that connects. “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.
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