Octopus & Others: art around Papo Colo's sculpture-book.

Octopus & Others: Acts of Collaboration & Poetics is a group exhibition at El Museo del Barrio. It is inspired by Papo Colo's 1982 project Octopus: An Act of Sculpture, an accordion-style outdoor book made of plywood panels first staged in the museum's courtyard, with several panels recently gifted to the museum's Permanent Collection and shown for the first time in more than four decades. Each page of Octopus was made onsite by an artist or poet from New York City's uptown and downtown scenes, including Nicholasa Mohr, Pedro Pietri, Vito Acconci, Tehching Hsieh, and Juan Sánchez, forming an anthology of the city's early 1980s poetry and art. Taking Colo's transformation of the book into sculpture and public action as its point of departure, the exhibition brings together cross-generational works from the collection, archival materials, and loans that consider how artists have embraced and reconsidered the book form in response to shared social, political, and environmental concerns.