It is not every art dealer who calls forth the kind of widespread, genuinely personal mourning that greeted the demise of Richard Timperio this weekend. Even less often is it artists leading the charge, as the latter usually look upon dealers as business associates more than friends. But Timperio was no ordinary art dealer. A better-than-average painter himself, he was also a community leader: The mammoth “Sideshow Nation” exhibition staged annually at the eponymous Sideshow gallery in Williamsburg, with literally hundreds of participants, was as much (if not more) a civic enterprise as it was a venture in high-risk capitalism.

Timperio suffered a massive stroke last week while visiting friends in upstate New York, and had to be rushed to the Albany Medical Center. He died on Sunday, September 9, at the age of just 71. He is survived by his daughter Cheyenne and his son Willy—the children of his former companion, Elspeth Leacock. Expressions of grief from an unusually wide range of people in the art world continue to pile up on Facebook.

A native of Ohio, Timperio arrived in New York in 1970 with dreams of becoming an artist, although his first foray was the design for a pinball machine. Relocating to New Mexico, he found he was able to make a living in commercial art. (It was in the south-west that he acquired his trademark black cowboy hat – as much a part of his latter-day persona as his wavy, shoulder-length iron gray hair, his genial smile and his booming laugh). Before long, he headed back to the Big Apple, where he graduated to political caricatures for The New York Times and began to paint in earnest – initially within the sphere of pop, evolving into abstraction in the early 1980s. His first abstract pictures were heavily laden with paint and employed organic forms, but this gave way to the thinner paint application and gently geometric shapes that define his mature style. His last show, in 2015, was at André Zarre in Chelsea.

Timperio’s “day job,” Sideshow, originated in 1995 when a Thai restaurant in Williamsburg invited him to hang some art on its walls. In those days, the neighborhood was still working-class, with rents that appealed to artists, and subsequently to galleries. Williamsburg is now gentrified almost beyond recognition, but it still appeals to a younger and more progressive demographic, to whom Sideshow’s annual extravaganzas appeal which makes sense since they were originally titled “Merrie Peace” and were anti-war shows.

It’s been so long since I first saw Timperio’s spectaculars that I’m not sure who introduced me to them. Most likely it was Sasha Silverstein, a subscriber to my blog, (An Appropriate Distance) From the Mayor’s Doorstep (FMD), who exhibited her impressionist figure studies and landscapes in these shows, . Since I try to review work by my subscribers, I beat feet to this group show and and was pleasantly surprised to find work by many other artists whom I admire: Larry Poons and his wife, Paula De Luccia, Dan Christensen, Randy Bloom, Francine Tint, Jim and Ann Walsh, Lauren Olitski, and Peter Reginato, among others. Ever since, I have devoted much space to reviewing these shows in FMD.

Still, I don’t think I’m unique. Nobody who visited these sprawling “Sideshow Nation” shows could forget the hundreds of artworks mounted together, from the baseboards to the ceilings. Paintings, drawings, prints, collages, and photographs provided the two-dimensional experience, while assemblages, kinetic art and more conventional carved or modeled sculpture extended the panorama to the third dimension. Fans like myself of high quality abstraction found these shows wonderfully rewarding, but representational work – like that of Silverstein — was well-represented, too. And although Timperio favored “something to see” in his own artwork, the shows had at least a modest quotient of conceptual and other “edgy” but less purely visual art.

Above all, it was the spirit in which these “Sideshow Nation” exhibitions were mounted that made them so distinctive. They were somehow cooperative in spirit, with famous artists jostling modest ones who practically never exhibited. Husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings all exhibited together. Artists best known as artists cozily shared wall space with artists best known as critics or even artists best known as dealers. Indeed, these multi-faceted shows were more than merely art shows: they were the joint creation of a whole community, a Sideshow “nation” indeed.

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Richard Timperio lends new meaning to the terms “skying” and “grounding” with the humungous 470-artist group show, Sideshow Nation, at his Williamsburg gallery.  The precedent for such jam-packed art installation that comes to mind is the 19th-century style of exhibition of the great European academies and salons with their paintings hung floor to ceiling to which the public flocked en masse.  Sideshow Nation closes this coming weekend after a two-month run.

“I never liked the idea of a Christmas show,” the artist-turned-gallerist tells me.   “A lot of little trinkets.  Nobody buys them and nobody cares.” In the early days of Sideshow he staged just such an event, with the title “Merry Peace,” but what he has come to prefer is  “an overview – a chance to show what people are doing.”

An estimated crowd of 2,000 attended the opening January 5.  Of coure, if each artist attended with a couple of friends it would get up to that number pretty fast.  People lined up in the cold half way around the block, and Timperio had to stand out on the pavement, in order to let new people in only after previous guests had left.

The official hours were six to nine PM but the galleries were still crowded at eleven. Timperio’s annual salon has become a New York art world fixture: even its premier fun couple, Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz, were spotted in the line in one recent year.

The hanging is a work of art in itself, a complex checkerboard of paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptural objects. But then, Timperio is himself an artist, and one who has evolved through a variety of personae..  (His own show at Art 101 in Williamsburg was reviewed by artcritical in 2011.)

WhenTimperio arrived in New York in 1970,  in his early twenties, from his native Ohio, he designed a pinball machine. This was followed by a sojourn in New Mexico, where he was able to make a living in commercial art (and acquired his trademark cowboy hat). Returning to New York in the later ‘70s he did political caricatures for the New York Times and began to devote more time to his painting.

Starting out in a pop idiom, with special attention to rodeos, Timperio evolved into abstraction when, as he says, “I realized that I was more interested in what the paint was doing than in telling a story.”  This was in the early eighties, when he also started to paint on the floor. Dan Christensen, a good friend, was a big influence on his art.

Sideshow had its beginnings in 1995, when the legendary Williamsburg restaurant, Planet Thailand, invited Timperio to hang some art on its walls. In those days, Williamsburg was still a working-class neighborhood where artists found attractive rents. “We would have an opening and you could actually have a dialogue,” Timperio recalls, nostalgically.

But other galleries and young professionals followed the artists, and they, in turn, were followed by edgy boutiques, restaurants and condos: the usual story. Today, a Sotheby’s real estate office shares the block with the cheerfully graffiti-decorated building into which Sideshow moved in 2000, and, grouses Timperio, “Everything costs a fortune.”

Some of the artists showing in this year’s Sideshow Nation are “celebs” like Paul Resika, Bill Jensen, Forrest (“Frosty”) Myers and Dorothea Rockburne.  Others are at least as well known for their writing: Robert Morgan, Phong Bui, Mario Naves; or their dealing:  Janet Kurnatowski, Pauline Lethen. Some are unknowns and/or friends of artists included in the past, and some are tried and true friends of Timperio’s who have returned year after year.

It’s also a family affair, with brothers Don and Dan Christensen, Ronnie Landfield and son Noah Landfield, husband-and-wife team James Walsh and Ann Walsh,  twins Carol Diamond and Cathy Diamond, and  Timperio’s own artist-childrenWillie Timperio and Cheyenne Timperio.  The younger Timperios both showed abstraction in the past but this year both opted for figuration.

Most of the artists on display are alive, and of all ages, but occasionally room is made for a distinguished deceased.  For instance, a lively self-portrait drawing by the late impresario Willoughby Sharp is in the current show, as is a fine small painting by Dan Christensen.

Being a painter himself, Timperio is not overly enthusiastic about conceptual art.  “It has to have something you can see,“ he says.  He considers the visual “more important than meaning – I’m not big on the word. But I try to keep it as open as possible. I think every generation has something valuable to say.”

Sideshow Nation at Sideshow Gallery through March 24, 319 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 486-8180

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September 8 to October 9, 2011
101 Grand Street, between Berry Street & Wythe Avenue
Williamsburg,  (718) 302-2242

Most people in the art world familiar with Richard Timperio think of him in terms of his booming laugh and outsize cowboy hat, presiding over hectic openings at his Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg. But there’s another side to Timperio, one that has been gradually maturing ever since he studied painting in the 1960s at the Cleveland Institute of Art in his hometown, his creative side. Over the years, his art evolved from pop-inspired imagery to scenes of rodeos (after a sojourn in New Mexico in the 1970s) after which the subject matter became more and more vague. The artist became less interested in social content,  thus allowing his panoramas to afford purely visual satisfaction. For a while, he worked with heavy, sweeping applications of paint and sand in a gestural abstract style. A year ago, however, in a group show at Art 101, he demonstrated the beginnings of a new direction now more fully realized in his current solo exhibition at the same gallery.  The best thing (of many good things) about these new paintings is that somehow they are as cheerful and ebullient as Timperio the jovial host.

Gone is the heavy, serious, gestural surface. Instead, the new surfaces are light and airy, with clear and lively reds, blues, greens and other vivid, crystalline colors.  Timperio freshens up a timeless visual trope, the figure- ground relationship.  First, there is an undercoat consisting of large, soft, pale rectangles, squares or circles of brightly colored acrylic, areas whose boundaries are so fluid that the paint appears to have been stained into unsized canvas.  (In reality, the fluid appearance of this ground is achieved by applying it over an undercoat of white house paint mixed with a dispersant, then superimposing the colored paint while the undercoat is still wet.)  Once these colors are dry, a series of smaller images are superimposed with a brush.

The “figures” in his figure- ground relationship are sometimes circles or discs or squiggles. At their best, these curvilinear elements are perfectly delightful, for example in the aptly-named Turquoise Wheel.  Even more effective, however, are the larger number of paintings in this show that employ congeries of lean little rectangles for their figures—sometimes outlined with strips of paint, sometimes surrounded with nothing more than a pencil-narrow line, but in any event dancing in an energetic fashion in the center of the field. If the rectangles are predominantly vertical, the picture usually follows suit, as for example in Jazz Blocker, a smaller work on paper, whereas a painting where the rectangles are mostly horizontal, most notably in Sunliner, an excitingly jazzy, larger picture on canvas, the composition is horizontal.  Not all of this show is at the same level of intensity. Since Timperio has been working longer with the smaller pieces on paper, a higher proportion of these works, unsurprisingly, come off.  As a whole the show is simply lots of fun and pleasure, easy to come away from with a smile.

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