Once There Was a Little Boy and Everything Turned Out Alright. THE END. (distorted for the times and for the benefit of Printed Matter), 1993/2020
From the Fundraising Edition series I Was In The Middle Before I Knew That I Had Begun
20% of the proceeds from the total sales of this edition, will be donated to three organizations continuing to support mutual aid efforts within local communities in the ongoing movement to protect Black lives.
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The eponymous two-line story was first encountered by Louise Lawler’s’s mother on the wall of a roadside café. The text has since occurred in the artist’s work on a few occasions; paired with a photograph of a living room (1985), printed on glass tumblers (1986), and as a wall paint and Letraset edition in varying dimensions (1993). The latter iteration was part of Songs of Retribution; a group exhibition consisting of a large number of women artists, curated by Nancy Spero at the Richard Anderson Gallery in SoHo. The directions for the 1993 work were to paint a wall a specific shade of pink, and to position the type in the center. Here, Lawler revisits the text as an archival pigment print edition with the certainty of the story distorted to reflect the instability of our time, and everyone’s incalculable fates amidst today’s concurrent crises.
Louise Lawler was born in 1947 in Bronxville, New York, and lives and works in New York. One of the foremost members of the Pictures Generation, in 2017 she was the subject of a one-person exhibition, WHY PICTURES NOW, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has had additional one-person exhibitions at Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Dia:Beacon, New York; and Museum für Gugenwartskunst, Basel.
