Harley Spiller

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel: Harley, I am unable to recall when we met and I do know that it was through Martha Wilson and Franklin Furnace, and that it was at least two decades ago. Could it have been when María Alós and I launched The Passerby Museum in Lower Manhattan, with LMCC?

Harley Spiller: You have become such an essential part of life and art’s fabric that I cannot peg a first meeting but yes 2002 with your Passerby Museum with dear María Alós, who has moved to another plane but I remember her kindnesses and her endearing attitude very well – and I treasure not only the tiny 2-d wood cutout portrait she made of me, which watches over me from his perch atop the window over my desk, but the rubber band ball her colleague at New York Public Library bequeathed her which she gave to me when she learned I collect rubber bands.  I’ve expanded it a little over the years and it’s now as big and heavy as a bowling ball - with bounce no less!

Participating in Jillian McDonald’s Seams project for Lower Manhattan Cultural Council is also memorable. The giant hat I’m sporting was a gift from my folks who spotted a local wearing one when they visited Russia. It reminded Dad of the hat his Dad wore on the cold windy steppes of what’s now known as Ukraine. He inquired, went to the milliner’s shop, and had one made for me. In 2002 when Jillian invited people to lend a meaningful article of clothing, talk with her about it, and come back a few weeks later to claim their prized clothing, altered with a permanent message by the artist. The inside of my hat is now embroidered with part of a statement i made in conversation with her, “for  protection against greedy war enthusiasts and their actions.” In this photo I am wearing the hat and a t-shirt with the Cyrillic name of the village where my dad's family came from, Pidvolichisk. When Russia started waging war against Ukraine, my wife and I gave to the Red Cross but that didn’t make us feel any better. So I reserved and paid for an Air B&B in Pidvolochisk, and another in my Mom's family's town, Kaminetz Podolsk, and told the proprietors we could not come and asked them to use the money for anti-war efforts. That felt good and the lady homeowner in Pidvolochisk was very friendly and asked for a photo so I took this selfie – unflattering yes I do see my bloodlines in the image. One day I got an email from Pidvolochisk and she had gone to the local library and found a rubber stamp image from my uncle’s 19th century fruit and vegetable business.  Someday if peace comes I will visit.

NDEREOM: That is a compelling story about your connection to Ukraine. I have thought to trace my family roots in Lebanon, and I still have to gather the courage to do so. I am unsure as to where to trace my roots on the other side of Africa (possibly West Africa), from where some of my relatives come from. I would like to go there as well, however little information I have the cultures lives in my body.

We are both collectors. I started with chromolithographs of saints, and that is how I built my first altar in my bedroom in the Caribbean. I had to have every saint in the Catholic pantheon. How did it start for you?

HS: Well I started with chromolithographs of sinners. Just teasing. I don’t know what my first collections were – probably seashells, sticks, leaves or perhaps rocks kicked home. The first collection I remember was US pennies – Dad started me on the hobby one day in 1964 when I was home sick from kindergarten. He tossed me a sack of pennies and a blue Whitman com folder and I’ve enjoyed the hobby ever since, especially the search for uncommon coins. I knew I’d proven by collecting mettle when a few years later Dad ceremoniously handed over a dented coffee can full of coins his father had gathered over a lifetime in Pidvolochisk and LeRoy, New York. I moved on to small toy cars, and business cards from stores, and very much regret discarding (pun intended) the latter collection on one of the frequent “clean up your room or else” directives from Mom.  Oh how I wish I could once again hold my 3 Stooges Club membership card which was rubber banded together with those old business cards. 

NDEREOM: Can you talk about art-making for you in relationship to collecting? Do you see your practice as being connected to museography, institutional critique, or as being linked to installation art? Is there an element of performance art in your work? I would like to hear about it!

HS: In my particular (peculiar?) case, collecting is halfway to art-making. It took me decades of exhibiting collections in unique ways to consider that doing such made me an artist. I focus on collections of everyday objects most people don’t think twice about: pencils, bottle caps, spoons, scissors, menus and the like. It’s one thing to build a collection; it’s wholly different to share that collection with the public. It’s said that artists help people see the world in new ways and so it is with the attendant knowledge and inspirations that assemblages of ordinary things can evoke if studied with care. My exhibitions are indeed site-specific installations and they venture into performance art when I work with the artifacts and the public live and in person.

NDEREOM: Are you still and avid collector or are you in the decommissioning phase? It is so difficult for me to part with items that hold so much meaning to me personally. Again, in my case this is so connected to my Catholic/Vodoun upbringing and to the concept of the relic.

HS: In the mid 1990s, supercollector Harris Diament told me he was selling his wide-ranging collection of coat hangers I fell silent and became distraught. How could you even think of selling something you’d spent years and years building and refining, I asked. His practical response left me thinking, “no way, not me, never.”  A little over a decade later I’d changed my tune, placing my Chinese restaurant archives (some 10,000 items in 57 cartons weighing half a ton) in the Special Collections library at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. These cultural artifacts are now professionally catalogued, digitized and stored –making them freely available for research, online and in person, something I never would have accomplished on my own. It feels great that scholars and the general public now has access to this trove and I’ve gone on to place other collections in permanent public homes. A selection of my gift of 1,000+ artifacts related to newsstand paperweights are now on permanent exhibition at the New York State Museum in Albany, New York, our nation’s first and largest state museum, alongside a vintage Times Square newsstand which I helped the State procure from the City and its operator, Mr. Mahmoud Sapan. 8 record storage boxes of archival materials documenting my parents advertising and sales promotion business are housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and papers and items from my father, who was the first US soldier to enter Buchenwald when WWII ended, are in a small synagogue museum collection outside St. Louis (Missouri not France).

It is rewarding to know that these collections will be seen and deployed by many, perhaps long after I’m gone and I’m aiming to place most of my collections in such new homes and thus relieve my dear wife and son of any such deacquisition burdens.

NDEREOM: Do you find yourself absorbing collections belonging to others who they cannot longer care for? You gifted me with some of yours and I could not say “no.” What you gave me were your slides from your family’s travels to an area of the world that I so much love: the Balkans. I did not have the room for your carousels of slides and I had to say “yes.”

HS: Thank you for helping me surface from seemingly endless waves of stuff that came out of my childhood home, where my parents and sisters lived for some 60 years – never once holding a garage sale!  Artists Naeem Mohaiemen and Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn also kindly accepted donations from those slides and are hopefully making hay with my parent’s camerawork. Giving a collection to another collector can be wonderful but I made the mistake of adding too many items to my wife’s sugar packet collection and she abandoned it due to such outside interference. I feel bad still. That said, I was happy to accept some 400 restaurant menus from a woman who had gathered them over the years as a Chinese food reporter, and had my cousin Glenn not found and given a 1916 Chinese menu, I may never have gone back into history to add to the original collection of rather plebeaian menus collected contemporaneously in the 1980s.

NDEREOM: Gifts keep coming to me. It is difficult to say no when one admires certain objects. I am also a Caribbean maximalist. I can’t picture myself living in a Zen environment or going to a church with no icons. How have your extensive travels informed your creative process, and how do you bring together all of your interests at the moment of producing an exhibition?

HS: Over the years I have developed a theory about collecting: “it’s not about the stuff, it’s about what can be learned from the stuff.” It’s true, I have visited 6 continents, and one of my passports has extra pages sewn in to accommodate a particularly rich stretch of travel in the late 1990s, and yes the Harley Spiller you see today is made up of experiences from these world travels. I don’t know precisely how all these influences come out in an exhibition – I guess people are like funnels, taking in a wealth of information and experience and parceling it out into the various regions of my mind and body to be used as needed (or, gasp, forgotten). I have planets in all areas of the horoscope, and so I pick precise topics to focus on – still, the things I include have been known to make people wonder if I have any parameters at all.

NDEREOM: Teaching is central to your path and I have seen you in action with students at City and Country School in Manhattan, where I taught throughout several decades. I have become aware of how some artists downplay their teaching because, according to peer pressure, in order to be a successful artist, one should not be teaching but living off selling one’s work with a fancy gallery. Give me a break. There is also the whole trend about pedagogy (a word many English speaking people do not know how to pronounce or what its meaning is). On the other hand, many educators have devoted decades into the field of teaching and, for me, to try to coopt this so easily for art purposes does not feel right. Long statement. No question.

HS: Thank you for introducing me to City and Country School, a 100+ year old wonderment with a hands-on curriculum that meshes neatly with my work as Inspector Collector.  I adore teaching, and have some kind of preternatural attraction to the 5-8 year old set. When Martha Wilson became emerita and I took the reins as director of Franklin Furnace, she encouraged me to continue my teaching practice for two reasons: one because I love it and two because being in the classroom helps me understand firsthand the needs of the teaching artists I supervise as director of the Furnace’s SEQ ART KIDS program. Holding forth for 45 or 90 minutes with three dozen wee ones is often draining – but each ounce of energy they take from me is replaced with such truth, delight and joy that I run back for more and more every chance I get.

NDEREOM: I got a chance to teach with SEQ ART KIDS, and we had so much fun building maps on the floor or a large classroom in Brooklyn. I asked the teacher to put all desks and the like aside and to get on the floors to create maps of the neighborhood. I know that some of your collections have been going to museums. Do you conceive of their placement in institutions as an artwork in itself or a collection of objects? Do you see any distinctions between the role of the collector and that of the artist?

HS: The distinctions between collecting and art-making in my case are indeed scant. For decades I identified as a museum worker and collector, refusing to label myself as an artist because I don’t create beautiful things from scratch. But hearing from the public that my exhibitions of ordinary everyday objects within creative contexts changes the way they see the world has given me the confidence to call myself an artist.  There is no other category I know of by which to pigeonhole my offbeat pursuits.

NDEREOM: What is one item you cannot part with?

HS: My wedding band. The cap from the bottle of water my Mom was drinking after a game of tennis just a few moments before she stroked out – no one else, not even my dear sisters, ascribes meaning to such mundanity.

NDEREOM: Thank you for being who you are. BTW! I hung the huge medal that you gifted me at BAAD! Bronx Academy of the Arts together with a Dominican weaving done by Doña Ritica, an elder from Santiago, Dominican Republic who died three or so years ago. Her daughter gave me one for her striking pieces.

HS: It is gratifying to know that at least one of the gifts I enjoy giving artists to congratulate them on their shows is getting some air time long after the opening.  Unless pressed and dried, the standard gift of flowers won’t last. Thank you for saving that silly thing – now I will be thinking about you thinking about me and what could be better.

All images courtesy of Harley Spiller / For specific credits hover over the image.

Harley Spiller’s links: Inspector Collector / Instagram / Press / Contact

Harley Spiller’s lifelong love of art and museums began in an art-filled family home and blossomed under teaching artists Carolyn Mahrer and Grace McKendry.  Internships at The White House and U.S. Department of State, The Burchfield Center, and The Albright-Knox Art Gallery led to staff positions at The Jewish Museum, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Gallery at Takashimaya, and Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc., where Harley has worked since 1986 and now serves as Ken Dewey Director.  Harley’s art is exhibited and collected internationally, and his writing has been published by Columbia University Press, The New York Times, Oxford University Press, University of California Press, and others. He holds a Guinness Record for the world’s largest restaurant menu collection, an archive now in the permanent collection of the Special Collections Library at University of Toronto, Scarborough. He has a BA in English Literature from Northwestern University and a MA in Liberal Studies, with Honors, from the New School for Social Research.  His book Keep the Change: A Collector’s Tales of Lucky Pennies, Counterfeit C-Notes, and Other Curious Currency (Princeton Architectural Press) was selected as one of the The New York Times 10 best art books of 2015.