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ARTIST ARCHIVE

Toyo Tsuchiya

male, born in Japan, American

Statement | Bio | Contact

Hells Angels E 3rd St. 1980; 20x16; Silver print. Sandra Binign in Performance 1983; Storefront; Silver print. Out the Street: Nite Snow 3rd Ave/ St. Marks 1983; Silver print.
Robert Parker in Forge Event 1985; Silver print. The Rivington Street Sculpture Garden All Material came from NYC streets July 1986. Twenty Five Different Things 1991.

Themes:
performance


Review:
The major photograph works of Toyo Tsuchiya began after he joined and became involved in the activities of a group of the artists of the Lower East Side in the 1980's called the Rivington School. Resisting the commercialization, being contemptuous of conventional career strategies and heavily inspired by neo-expressionism and graffiti art in the 1980's, the artists of the Rivington School shared a spirit of art brut or outsider art. Their works, in which art, music and performance were intermingled, were all about the fringe activities taking place in the working class, mostly Hispanic neighborhood centered below Houston Street on Rivington Street. Working with the artists of the group, Toyo took performance art photos focusing on No Se No, one of the gathering spots of the artists of this school where his documentation was put on the walls the day after the performance. Consequently, these works formed an intricate part of No Se No's social life and events, functioning as a record to serve the community. His photos have been exhibited at spaces across the Lower East Side and in Japan, remaining as the best documentation of the Rivington School's street works after the sight was bulldozed in 1987. The art critic Holland Cutter wrote of Toyo's photographs as "Nothing remotely like this scene with its macho, improvised, beer-drinking, brain-pounding energy, exists in today's placid Manhattan art world. Mr. Tsuchiya's photographs, often pasted together into wall-filling collages, feel like reports of life on another, hipper planet, of which little trace would remain were it not for his persistent and attentive recording eye." Available research materials of Toyo Tsuchiya in the AAAC Archives are 95 slides, eight photographs taken and developed by the artist himself, invitation cards, press releases, reviews and other documents revealing his role as a curator and other activities of the artist.