Flying Saucers Are Real!

Flying Saucers Are Real!

Wednesday, Aug 03, 2016 - Sunday, Aug 21, 2016

Location:
Milk Gallery
450 West 15th Street
New York, NY 10011

The Jack Womack Flying Saucer Library is an astounding collection of popular and fringe thought dedicated to the flying saucer phenomenon that gripped the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. Assembled by Philip K. Dick Award-winning author Jack Womack, this library is important not only in its scope, but in the curatorial expertise that hand-selected the most representative publications of this movement. The onslaught of Flying Saucer sightings, beginning in the summer of 1947, is remarkable not only because they were reported so widely, but because so many people felt compelled to publish books explaining what these saucers might be. The more books that were published, the wilder grew the imaginings and the broader grew the conspiracies. This collection represents a moment in history where the spiritual and the physical collided in the popular experience. Womack’s collection contains books, typescripts, pamphlets, tracts and magazines published primarily from 1948 to 1980. The collection includes most of the major 1950s works on flying saucers, the works of all major contactees, bibliographies, compilations of so-called photographs, and a number of publications from the Saucerian Press. Several books have supporting letters, ephemera, and press materials laid in.

BOO-HOORAY exhibits both at home in New York City as well as internationally. We also stage collaborative exhibitions with the Hayward Gallery and Rough Trade in London, Tsutaya Daikanyama, Hysteric Glamour, and United Arrows in Tokyo, Galleri Operatingplace in Stockholm, Colette in Paris, PopMontreal in Montreal, Mishka Los Angeles, Printed Matter at both MOCA/LA and PS1/NYC, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the New York Public Library, the Grolier Club, and Milk Gallery in New York.

Boo-Hooray exhibitions have included shows featuring Larry Clark, The Velvet Underground, Ray Johnson, Afrika Bambaataa, Jonas Mekas, Ed Sanders, Linder Sterling and Jon Savage, Spencer Sweeney, Houston Rap, private press vinyl, Wallace Berman, anarcho-punk group Crass, Jason Polan, Jack Smith, cult-filmmaker Ed Wood, and Situationist Times editor Jacqueline de Jong.

The exhibitions are drawn from cultural archives that Boo-Hooray excavates, organizes, and places in institutions such as Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Cornell University’s Division of Rare Manuscript Collections, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.