Nothing Is: Sun Ra and Others' Covers

Press Release

Starting in the 1960s, extraterrestrial-American musician, composer, and thinker Sun Ra and his band the Arkestra began decorating their own record covers. Partially as an economical way to make small batches of LPs for sale at their concerts, and partly as a continuation of their pioneering DIY activity with their artist-run record label Saturn Records, Ra and his cohorts would gather together, using colored pens, pencils, paints, and collage to design unique jackets for their albums, offering them to the audience from the edge of the stage at the set break or after the show. The rarest of these used fragments of shower curtains from the legendary Sun Ra house in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in their elaborate collaged designs. These covers are of course now prized fetish objects. Many of them were compiled in the book Sun Ra: Art on Saturn: The Album Cover Art of Sun Ra’s Saturn Label (Fantagraphics, 2022), which situated the handmade covers in context with their more commercially (however still small-batch) produced, offset-printed counterparts.

In Nothing Is, organized by John Corbett and Albert Oehlen for the JUBG Space in Köln and Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago, a wide range of contemporary artists from varying locations and backgrounds is invited to make their own handmade record covers for specific Sun Ra LPs, whether actual or fictional. The show takes its title from a Ra poem (itself reprinted on the ESP LP called Nothing Is):

At first nothing is;
Then nothing transforms itself to be air
Sometimes the air transforms itself to be water;
And the water becomes rain and falls to earth;
Then again, the air through friction becomes fire.
So the nothing and the air and the water
And the fire are really the same---
Upon different degrees.

Installed alongside original, rarely-seen Saturn cover designs, the artists in Nothing Is are invited to make nothing into something, to imagine a Ra cover that never existed, perhaps invent a whole record that was never produced. In other words, to participate in what Ra called Myth-Science. Ra insisted that Black Americans had special powers of self-invention. They were charged with making their newly crafted myths personal and current, while reaching back into the collective past. The creation of new truths and fresh explanations; the overthrow and subversion of the realm of myth-making; the narrative turn from his-story to history. This is in keeping with Ra’s hands-on methodology, which was self-generative, right down to his name, identity, life-story, music, poetry, stage concept, band-leadership style, lifestyle, philosophy of life, and plan for planet earth. Taking a simple unified starting point – a 12-inch square surface – the exhibition invites the artists to embrace the Nothing Is paradox, asserting that nothingness is itself a form of being and something that never happened might nevertheless exist.

Exhibiting Artists:

Ellen Berkenblit, Mark Booth, André Butzer, Brian Calvin, Luke Calzonetti, Aaron Curry, Peter Fengler, Christina Forrer and Caroline Thomas, Kim Gordon, Magalie Guérin, Philip Hanson, Rachel Harrison, Richard Hull, Marcus Jahmal, Sven-Ake Johansson, Felix Kubin, Jinn Bronwen Lee, Damon Locks, Chris Martin, Josiah McElheny, Roscoe Mitchell, Jason Moran, Rebecca Morris, Celeste Rapone, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Matthias Schaufler, Emil Schult, Lui Shtini, Amy Sillman, John Sparagana, Ricky Swallow, Günter Tuzina, Omar Velazquez, Christopher Williams, Terry Winters, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung

Visit Website: JUBG Space