Atelier Editions/D.A.P., 2023. Paperback, 256 pp., 7.9 x 10.7 inches
Curtis Cuffie was an artist who lived and worked in and around the East Village from the mid-1980s until his death in 2002. He moved to New York from Hartsville, South Carolina, as a teenager and lived unhoused for long stretches of his adult life. Cuffie found local notoriety for the way he adorned the streets of downtown New York, collecting what the city provided, often sifting trash to stage on-the-spot sculptures along the Bowery and Cooper Square. His arrangements took the form of impossibly balanced towers, delicate shrines, and unwieldy processions up to thirty-feet in length installed along the walls, fences, and sidewalks of the Lower East Side. Nearly without fail they were removed by inclement weather, the department of sanitation, or the grounds team at Cooper Union, which would later employ him.
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