Roberta talks with artist and longtime curator at both Moore College of Art and Design and Arcadia University, Richard Torchia. They cover Torchia's early post-college experience working for architects and an early artist collective in Newark, NJ, and his recurring fascination with and use of photocopier machines to make art and books. Torchia is a Pew fellow and has created notable exhibitions that focused on national and international artists, as well as Philadelphia artists. Enjoy this Philadelphia art history lesson by a curator who made a lot of it happen.
Roberta Fallon: I’m talking with Richard Torchia about his multifaceted career as a curator and artist in Philadelphia. Thank you for being here, Richard.
So let’s start here…You told me earlier your first job in the arts was in Newark, New Jersey, and you were young, 25? And you are an English major, but you had an interest in art, right?
Richard Torchia: Thank you again for this opportunity. I’m so grateful to have this chance to reflect and recollect with you in this way. You’re incredibly well versed and knowledgeable about art in Philadelphia and an ideal person to be doing this with.
Just to start, I wanted to confirm I was actually 27 at the time that I took that job directing City Without Walls in Newark, what became New Jersey’s longest-running artist-run space, which was founded in 1975. The gallery was on the second floor of a building on Halsey Street, above a shoe store and beneath a floor of artists’ studios. For a short time, the space also managed a color photocopier, Xerox’s 6500, which it rented to artists by the hour when the machine was working. I had used it for my own work, which I had exhibited at City Without Walls a year earlier in a group show. Access to this copier was part of the appeal. During my tenure—I was there only for about 18 months—we lost the lease on this space. Prudential Life Insurance, one of the gallery’s supporters, helped us relocate to a corner storefront in one of the mall-like corridors near the Newark train station, which made it much more accessible.
I had been offered the position, in part, because its director, who had been planning to depart, had witnessed the work I’d done helping to present a memorial exhibition for a friend and formative mentor, Betty Ruth Curtiss (1931-1985), who had been a member of the collective. Together with her daughter Lisa, and another artist friend, Richard Kapolka, we organized a survey of Betty Ruth’s work that had been proposed by the gallery.
Betty Ruth’s practice was grounded in found objects and immediate processes, including rubber stamping, mail art, and xerography, which she had initially employed as a way to document the necklaces she made. It was Betty Ruth who, in 1981, introduced me to the art and writing of Pati Hill, whose archive was transferred to Arcadia in 2017. In her backyard she maintained a set of instruments she’d produced from street finds. Among them was a xylophone she had constructed from pieces of wood of various lengths resting on parallel rows of bicycle inner-tubes, which allowed them to resonate surprisingly well, as anyone with the curiosity to play would discover. She also cultivated a number of small collections, including chewed gum and found combs, as well as lost gloves, which she presented on a wooden card rack on the family’s front porch in Princeton where neighbors might find or deposit them.
She also collected laundry lint from her own dryer, which had a circular lint screen. A stack of about 300 of these was included in the show along with examples of her work in other mediums, which a year later was presented at Franklin Furnace in New York, the venue founded by Martha Wilson, who encouraged Lisa and I to produce a catalog for the show on the venue’s black and white copier.
The offer to direct the gallery came as a surprise to me as I had no experience whatsoever as an administrator or grant writer.
Roberta: But you accepted the position?
Richard: Yes. Partly because I thought it might be a way to consolidate my interests, which had something to do with being confused about what to do with my BA in English. I had naively thought that English majors became writers. I knew there were careers in academia, and had flirted with the idea of going to graduate school, but I was also impatient to get to work doing something that mattered to me. I never thought of myself as a scholar but was looking for a subject, which became what artists were doing with photocopiers.
I had attended Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and chose to study abroad my junior year, a process administered – as it just so happened – by Beaver College (which became Arcadia University in 2001). Only later did I learn that the school had a reputation for its study abroad program. I ended up at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, where its Sainsbury Center had just opened with a building designed by Norman Foster that resembled an airplane hangar. The Sainsbury Center proved to be a handy introduction to Modernism and helped pave the way for an epiphany I had when, during the winter break, I traveled to Italy and France for the first time. In Paris, I visited the Pompidou Center, which had opened the year before. It was there that I first saw iconic examples of contemporary art, including Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955-59) – the taxidermied angora goat with the tire around its waist – and Paul Thek’s “dead hippie,” (The Tomb, 1967). Nothing I’d seen at the Sainsbury Center – even the Giacomettis or the Francis Bacons – could have prepared me for this kind of art, which I had no tools to apprehend. The need to figure out a way to think about this stuff flipped a switch that I’ve never been able to turn off.
Roberta: You had to go to Europe to connect with American contemporary art. That’s ironic. What happened when you got back to America?
Richard: That is ironic. I also find it telling that you should notice this because that kind of art historical concern would not have been on my radar. For me, it was more about the radical presence of these works. When I returned to Holy Cross the following year, I audited an art history class. And perhaps because I wasn’t being graded, I enjoyed the assignments, one of which was to write short descriptions of in-person encounters with artworks. I had the chance to visit MoMA and chose to write about one of Ad Reinhardt’s black squares that was on view. The way its cruciform composition became more visible as I looked at it was a revelation. This was a perceptual, phenomenological experience that did not seem to require any specialized knowledge and which I enjoyed describing.
And as much as I’ve come to appreciate the way looking at good art can make language useless, I started to see the value of attaching words to this experience and how the effort could activate a reciprocal loop in which writing became a way to think, which encouraged better seeing. In very basic terms, it’s not unlike the transformation that happens when the color brown becomes more intriguing or vivid when it’s referred to as “chestnut.” Eventually I came across Robert Filliou’s statement, “Art is what makes life more interesting than art,” which I think captures and expands this process better than anything I know.
Roberta: For an English major to say “looking at good art can make language useless” is quite interesting to me! Can you elaborate a little?
Richard: I guess that’s one way to refer to the speechlessness of awe. Language put to the service of analysis and interpretation had a gripping effect on me, especially as I had entered college as a pre-med student and struggled painfully with chemistry and math classes. It wasn’t until the spring of my senior year—when some friends who were taking art classes showed me what they were doing with a photocopier—that things started to fall in place. I was fascinated by what I saw my friends doing with the machine and wanted to learn more about the creative applications of xerography, research that introduced me to the need for a publication about the topic. This was 1980. Xerox’s Color 6500 copier had been released in 1973 and was being used by artists, zine producers, as well as graphic designers. The cover of Television’s 1977 album “Marquee Moon” is one memorable example. I wouldn’t know about Seth Siegelaub’s “Xerox Book” (1968) until a few years later. Nonetheless, I started to think about publishing a magazine about “copy art” and began talking to people about it, reaching out mostly on the phone and via letters. I also started to experiment with the machine myself.
After I graduated from Holy Cross I returned home to Toledo, Ohio for an internship at Bowling Green State University in its publications department. I was given my own office next to the department’s photocopier, which I used when I could. Later that year I started a second internship in the publications office at the Toledo Museum of Art. Have you ever been to Toledo?
Roberta: I’ve been through Toledo on the way to Ann Arbor and visited its Glass Pavilion.
Richard: Toledo, as you may know, is called the “Glass City.” It supplies Detroit with the windshields it needs.
Roberta: Oh, wow. I did not know that.
Richard: As part of my internship at the museum, I had the opportunity to write short exhibition reviews for a regional art magazine called Dialogue. The process required that I type the text and layout the page. A lot of these activities, however improvised and crudely done, were exactly what I would do later at Moore College as well as Arcadia—and certainly at City without Walls.
Roberta: Your work with books, copy machines, and language is a long thread going through your career.
Richard: One of the first shows that I worked on at City without Walls was a landscape exhibition guest-curated by Leah Durner, a painter and writer who had recently received her M.F.A. from Rutgers University. It was a group show called Real Property that explored landscape as a commodity. Using a copier, we produced an illustrated catalog that included a text by Leah, which we distributed to critics. The show ended up getting reviewed in Artforum, which was surprising, in part, because it was a group exhibition, which art magazines tend to shy away from. The first sentence of the review opened with a reference to the catalog. It may have helped that the show included Dennis Oppenheim, Christo, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Walter de Maria.
Roberta: Oh my, the “Earth Room” artist.
Richard: Yeah. Along with gallery members and lesser-known artists, an approach that was important to Leah and one that I have tried to apply whenever possible since. It was a revelation to see how an artist-run space in Newark could be seen and heard like that.
Roberta: So, a Xerox-printed catalog caught the eye of the Artforum. I believe you mentioned a show in Princeton you were involved in? And that it had to do with art made by artists using copiers? Can you talk a little about that?
Richard: Before I moved to Hoboken, where I lived when I was working at City Without Walls, I lived in Princeton. My best friend from high school, Kevin Lippert (1959-2022), was a graduate student in the school of architecture there. In the summer of 1981 he encouraged me to rent a room in the house near campus that he shared with other students, the back porch of which eventually became the first office of Princeton Architectural Press, which he founded while he was still a student. Of course, witnessing the inception of a successful imprint first hand—and sometimes assisting with the work—had a profound impact on me. I was teaching English as a second language part time, which often took me to New Brunswick, where I had familiarized myself with the studios at Mason Gross School of Art (Rutgers University), where there was also a Xerox 6500 that I was able to use. It was there that I first saw a sheet of paper catch fire in the machine, which was not uncommon.
Kevin managed to learn about an opening in the schedule in a small gallery at the Princeton Art Museum due to a cancellation and encouraged me to pitch an exhibition to one of the curators. By that time I had started to gather information about artists using photocopiers worldwide and developed a proposal for a show under the rubric of “new technology.” I’d never curated before, but my proposal was accepted. The resulting exhibition included Betty Ruth as well as artists I was just learning about, including Philadelphians Suzanne Horvitz, as well as Catherine Jansen and Will Larson, for example, who were living around the corner from Beaver College. Will was teaching photography at Tyler at the time. Are you familiar with him?
Roberta: Yes, I am. I love his work.
Richard: The show included examples of his “Fireflies” (1969–1978), collages made with the fax machines. (In 2001, Arcadia presented a solo show of Larson’s work in video, which he had recently started to explore.) There were also two collage poems made by Gerard Malanga using one of Andy Warhol’s’ “Death and Disaster” source photos. They were from a larger series that Malanga made on a Thermofax machine that Warhol had at the Factory. Produced by 3M in the 1950s, the device used heat to transfer images to chemically treated paper. Do you know these works?
Roberta: I’ve heard of Malanga and know Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series. But I didn’t know that the Factory had a Thermofax machine. It makes sense because Warhol did a lot of print-based works.
Richard: The museum purchased one of the Malanga works after the show. I was very lucky to be in the path of things like this, so when the opportunity in Newark popped up, it made sense to say yes.
Roberta: It’s great you had the experience in Princeton. And that you got to put together an exhibit there about an art form you were yourself engaged in and fascinated by. Your experience must have looked great to the Newark collective – plus, you were a curator who knew more than almost anyone else about this experimental genre.
Richard: There were others, but I would say that I had a dense Rolodex. I was still developing my plans for the copier magazine, which I had decided to call “Electrographics.” I had even started soliciting essays and reviews from writers, whom I paid. I also had help from Kevin, other Princeton friends, as well as my sister Mary, who assisted with the final paste-up work. A photocopied sampler of the first issue was available at “Bookworks: 1982,” a three-day, international symposium organized by Sue Horvitz with Nexus at Moore College. This became my first time visiting the school, which I recall had a large outdoor courtyard at its center.
Despite all the energy and goodwill for “Electrographics,” I was not able to come up with the funding I needed to print it, which I was convinced had to be done on an offset press. This was not only disappointing but awkward, as I had to return subscriptions. That said, I learned a great deal and met a lot of people. I continued to organize exhibitions for places like Todd’s Copy Shop on Mott Street in New York and had the chance to teach a class about the copier at Pratt Institute. In the end, despite the failure of the publication, the experience might have been more valuable than going to grad school.
Roberta: You had a great “learn by doing” experience! And I agree that it was more valuable than going to grad school. Talk about Moore College and moving to Philadelphia.
Richard: The job at City Without Walls was very challenging. Despite Prudential’s support, the financial difficulties started to become overwhelming. I learned about an opportunity at Moore College where construction on a new gallery—on the site of the courtyard I just mentioned—dedicated to exhibiting the work of Philadelphia artists, was being completed. Moore’s plan was to hire a curator from outside Philadelphia to help ensure an objective approach for the program that would complement that of the Goldie Paley Gallery, then being directed by Elsa Longhauser. The new space was named for alumna Rochelle Levy and its construction had been funded by the William Penn Foundation.
Roberta: I didn’t know the history of the gallery’s construction. I always wondered why it was down a few steps from the Paley Gallery. It’s great that William Penn funded a gallery dedicated to Philadelphia artists.
Richard: I learned that Elsa was deeply committed to publications and was glad that I’d brought a small selection of the exhibition catalogs I’d produced to the interview.
She offered me the job and I moved to Philadelphia in August of 1987. The city was then gearing up for the Duchamp Centennial that fall. Moore participated in two related exhibitions, which became the initial projects I worked on. The first was Duchampiana, a small exhibition featuring material from the collection of artist Howard Hussey, whom Elsa had invited to present a series of lectures about Duchamp that fall titled “Ocular Oasis.” Howard had been an assistant to Joseph Cornell, who had helped Duchamp assemble deluxe editions of his Boîte-en-valise (Box in a Valise) in the 1940s. I’d had a crush on Cornell, whose work I first learned about in the art history class I had audited. The publication documenting Cornell’s 1980 MoMA retrospective was the first exhibition catalog I’d ever purchased. Howard became a fast friend and an influential mentor and we have remained very close ever since.
Roberta: This is great history, Richard. I was not aware there was a Duchamp Centennial celebration in Philly but it makes a lot of sense, since the PMA has a big and amazing trove of Duchamp’s art. Also, did not know that Joseph Cornell worked briefly for Duchamp. Small world, or maybe not so small.
Richard: The second exhibition was a group show of found-object sculpture titled Objects-Dards, based on one of Duchamp’s bronze casts. Howard came up with the idea of printing the announcement card on a blue shipping tag. You know, the ones you often see with a string though the eyelet at the top. This card became an object itself and may have proved more memorable than anything in the show.
The inaugural exhibition for the Levy Gallery was scheduled to open in January 1988. Its goal would be to manifest the mission of the program, which was to be as diverse and inclusive as possible. What ensued for me was a crash course in Philadelphia art.
Roberta: Wow, you needed to speed date to get familiar with all the artists here.
Richard: Exactly. Elsa facilitated as many introductions as she could. It helped that Nexus had shelves of binders full of slides and that Sande Webster, the Fleisher Art Memorial, and others were so forthcoming and generous, including Don Bohn, who was then editing the New Art Examiner from an office at Moore. I also had the chance to see Momenta’s first exhibition— a large group show at the Cast Iron Building—which provided another valuable perspective on the community and its artist-run spaces.
Roberta: Momenta was an early artist collective in Old City, as I recall.
Richard: Yes. In the late ‘80s it was located at 309 North 3rd Street, where I had the chance to show and guest-curate. Momenta relocated to New York and reopened at a space in Brooklyn in 1995. In 2008, I felt fortunate to bring its exhibition, Air Kissing, a hilarious critique of the artworld, to Arcadia.
It’s humbling for me to think of the legitimate grievances aired by that show, in particular Jennifer Dalton’s carousel of 35mm slides documenting statistics regarding inequities of New York gallery exhibitions. In retrospect, my attempt to gather documentation about Philadelphia artists in 1987 feels guileless. Nevertheless, inspired by the slide registry at White Columns—a resource I had used during my time at City Without Walls—I began to amass a considerable collection of 35mm slides from local artists, which eventually became the Levy Gallery Slide Registry. I believe it served its purpose for many years, but was eventually rendered obsolete by the onset of digital and social media.
Roberta: It’s wonderful to hear about the beginning of the Slide Registry. Libby and I had our art in there and it was a great resource for Philadelphia curators. It must have been helpful for you.
Richard: Months of studio visits and conversations culminated in a five-person show entitled Achromatic Variations. It included large drawings by Steve Talasnik (in charcoal) and Jimmy Mance (in graphite), horizontal wall reliefs by Richard Jordan (carved and polished black marble) and Stephanie Tyiska (layered paper punctured by tacks), and five black, 5-ft. square canvases by Quentin Morris, whose work I had learned about from Julie Courtney. (Quentin’s works on paper became the subject of a solo exhibition at Arcadia in 2023.) Julie was then in her third year as founding director of the Temple Gallery. She was a remarkable resource and her exhibitions there, and since (as an independent curator), remain an inspiration. She also became a generous advocate of my own work. Do you remember the Temple space on Walnut Street?
Roberta: Yes, I think so! But I didn’t know Julie Courtney was the founding director of Temple Gallery.
