Road artist Matthew Courtney, a founding member of the grassroots Decrease East Facet arts nonprofit ABC No Rio and host of its celebrated Extensive Open Cabaret sequence, died final week in his Brooklyn condominium on the age of 66. A police investigation discovered that the reason for demise was an unintentional overdose, a member of the collective instructed Hyperallergic.
Born in 1959, Courtney grew up in Portland, Oregon, earlier than finally shifting to New York Metropolis within the early Nineteen Eighties, the place he helped foster the expansion of ABC No Rio, then an artists’ squat. From the mid-Nineteen Eighties by early Nineties, he hosted the weekly anything-goes open-mic occasion Extensive Open Cabaret on the artwork collective’s historic 156 Rivington Road tackle.
The sequence was an underground hub for New York outsider artists and dissident voices, and identified for placing on eccentric, radical, and uncooked performances spanning ten-minute political ramblings, spoken phrase poetry, and experimental music and theater. As author Rebecca Moore wrote for Mirabella Journal in 1990, “Sometimes it’s horrible, sometimes it’s a glimpse of emerging brilliance.” Courtney had only one stipulation for many who signed as much as take part: “You are on your honor to be amazing!”
Courtney making a cardboard signal at his Soho sidewalk gallery Steps to Nowhere (photograph by and courtesy Fly Orr)
ABC No Rio member and comedian artist Fly Orr instructed Hyperallergic that she was “blown away” by Courtney’s presence the primary time she attended one of many Extensive Open Cabaret occasions.
“The audience was his co-host, but he was always the one in the spotlight,” Orr stated, recalling how viewers members would steadily chime in to supply phrases of encouragement, sing alongside performances, or voice their opposition. Amid all of the loud chaos, “[Courtney] always knew how to rein it all in and get everyone back to a manageable state … with his very commanding, mellifluous baritone.”
Courtney’s theatrics had been captured in readings of his authentic poetry, similar to “Car Poem Number 1” and “Honey, I’m Home!,” the latter of which noticed him stroll by a yellow doorway and curl up on the ground in imitation of a buttered scone.
“He was beloved and admired by all who met him,” Orr continued. “He shined as much off stage as he did onstage.”
Courtney’s visible artwork repurposed discovered objects together with cardboard and newspapers. (photographs by Matthew Courtney, courtesy Fly Orr)
Courtney was additionally a longtime fixture of Soho’s road neighborhood. Starting within the early 2000s, he erected his makeshift, sidewalk-based Steps to Nowhere Gallery exterior storefronts and eating places on Prince Road, together with metallic steps that led into the wall of a now-defunct J.Crew, the Apple Retailer, and Fanelli Cafe, showcasing brightly coloured Pop Artwork portraits and humorous poetic meanderings. A lot of his artworks had been produced on repurposed discovered supplies like cardboard packing containers and segments pulled from the New York Occasions (his favourite was the climate part, in keeping with a 2008 Blogspot submit).
“I used to draw on the front page of the New York Times, but the screaming headlines and dramatic photos used to rattle people and I’d stopped doing that,” Courtney stated in a 2013 video interview filmed on the Steps to Nowhere Gallery. He turned towards different instantly accessible materials: A 2021 photograph posted to Instagram depicts a portray made on a paper subway discover, and different photographs exhibit that he steadily used slabs of wooden as canvases.
“Matthew, we carry forward the memory of your presence,” ABC No Rio wrote in a Fb submit. “You made room for the voices others overlooked, and reminded us that art is not just something we make, but something we live by.”
In commemoration of Courtney, the collective is distributing copies of the self-published zine documenting the Extensive Open Cabaret sequence this week; these can purchase these publications from its library at 107 Suffolk Road in Manhattan’s Decrease East Facet.
Fly Orr’s depiction of Courtney as host of the long-running Extensive Open Cabaret occasion sequence (picture by and courtesy the artist)
Matthew Courtney’s Steps to Nowhere gallery traveled up and down Prince Road, stationed exterior storefronts and eating places. (screenshot Maya Pontone/Hyperallergic through @matthew_courtney_art on Instagram)
