“PRECOCIOUS: Minor Works from the Fales Library” Exhibition at NYU’s Tracey/Barry Gallery, Through September 11, 2015

New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections presents PRECOCIOUS: Minor Works from the Fales Library, on view through September 11, 2015, at the Fales Library, 70 Washington Square South, Third Floor, New York, NY 10012. [Subways A,C,E, B,D,M to West 4th Street; 6 line to Astor Place; R train to 8th Street].

PRECOCIOUS: Minor Works from the Fales Library features works from the Fales archives created by artists, writers and zinesters primarily when they were age 21 or younger. The show includes documents and drawings by the young Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Richard Hell, Christopher Knowles, Linda Montano, Martha Wilson, David Wojnarowicz and Nick Zedd.

“The choice of the word minor is intentionally ambiguous,” said curator Lisa Darms, senior archivist at Fales. ”It can mean ‘inferior in importance,’ but it also refers to an entire category of people: everyone younger than the age of full legal responsibility, or ‘not of the majority’—a category all of us have been a part of.”

Works from PRECOCIOUS are also reproduced in the 80WSE Gallery windows on Washington Square East, an ongoing collaboration between 80WSE and the Fales Library.

PRECOCIOUS also features items from the Riot Grrrl Collection, which documents the feminist teen movement of the early 1990s. The exhibition showcases zines and flyers by Ramdasha Bikceem, Miranda July, and other teen girls, and even a few 19th century “proto-zines” from the Strickland sisters.

“This show asserts that works by minors are not unimportant,” said Darms. The fact that these documents are all drawn from the Fales Archives suggests another major/minor dichotomy: The unfinished, half-thought-through, or the failed, as opposed to the finished and authorized artworks exhibited in museums and galleries. The works here show that archival documents are compelling in their own right, in part because of their tenuous nature.”

About Fales Library and Special Collections:
The Fales Library, comprising nearly 358,000 volumes and over 10,000 linear feet of archive and manuscript materials, houses the Fales Collection of rare books and manuscripts in English and American literature, the Downtown Collection, the Riot Grrrl Collection, the Marion Nestle Food Studies Collection and the general special collections of the NYU Libraries. The Fales Collection was given to NYU in 1957 by DeCoursey Fales in memory of his father, Haliburton Fales. It is especially strong in English literature from the middle of the 18th century to the present, documenting developments in the novel. The Downtown Collection, founded in 1993, documents the downtown New York art, performance, and literary scenes from 1975 to the present and is extremely rich in archival holdings, including extensive film and video. The goal of the Downtown Collection is to comprehensively collect the full range of artistic practices and output of the Downtown scene, regardless of format. This research collection, built on a documentary strategy, supports the research of students and scholars who are interested in the intersection of the contemporary arts with other forms of cultural and artistic expression.

The NYU Division of Libraries comprises five libraries in Manhattan and one each in Brooklyn, Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. Its flagship, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library on Washington Square, houses more than four million volumes and receives 2.6 million visits annually. Around the world the Libraries offers access to more than 1.4 million electronic journals, books, and databases. For more information about the NYU Libraries, please visit http://library.nyu.edu