Larry Clark Stuff - New York

“Larry Clark Stuff,” Boo-Hooray’s exhibition drawn from Larry’s personal collection of skateboard decks, skater t-shirts, and related posters, stickers, photographs and stuff had a New York run at Milk Gallery.

Curated by Johan Kugelberg, the show featured Larry’s collection of skateboard decks and t-shirts spanning the late 1980′s up until today showcasing the guerrilla graphic design of companies like Fuct and Supreme, alongside outfits and boards used in Larry’s movies Wassup Rockers and Marfa Girl. We also showed a comprehensive collection of Larry Clark movie posters, exhibition posters and skateboard culture posters alongside portraits of Larry wearing a selection of vintage Fuct t-shirts. This was an expanded version of the show at MOCA in LA during February, 2013.

Rare Larry Clark books, posters, skateboard decks and ephemera were for sale, including the last copies of Larry’s commemorative 70th birthday skateboard decks. Everything was available in limited quantities and was sold on a first come first serve basis.

The exhibit opened with a party on March 6th and ran through March 14th, 2013.

LARRY:

I started getting fascinated by the graphics on skateboards and T-shirts back in the 80’s. They were the very best graphics that I’d ever seen on T-shirts. The graphics on skateboards were really extraordinary, because the kids would get their own boards from skateboard companies. The skateboard company would give them a deck and say, “okay, make a design.” So the kids would have to become artists and design their own decks. There was a freedom in the design, and a freedom in making these T-shirts. They would use these big corporation logos and screw them up and fuck with them and change them. And make them subversive. And make them mean the opposite. All the corporations could do would be to send a cease and desist letter to the company, but by then the skateboards were all sold out and the T-shirts were all sold out, because they’re very disposable. When you skate, the side of the skateboard that has the graphic on it gets all ruined. I mean I used watch kids go in and look at all the graphics and buy the board and immediately it would be eradicated. It was really a very temporary thing. I even did my own skateboard in 1992. I took my images and silkscreened them on the board. I bought 10–11 blank skateboard decks, which weren’t easy to get. I had to find a company that would sell me the blank decks. Then I silkscreened an image on it. Those are all gone now. They’re in museums.Then Supreme asked me to do a skateboard deck. Collectors started buying my decks, but my deal with Supreme was they did like 400 decks, and I got half of them. What I did with mine, was I just gave them to kids in the ghetto.