Amuse begins with a promise: a flicker of anticipation, a brief release from ordinary time. To be amused is to enter a pocket of space where the stakes are lower and the colors seem brighter. It is in this territory, shaped by pleasure, fantasy, and their enduring role in American visual culture, that the exhibition unfolds.
The works presented here were never meant for quiet rooms. They were made for boardwalks and midways, small-town carnivals, basements, and kitchen tables where families turned an evening into a game. Their surfaces once lived beneath seaside light and bare bulbs, in the salt air of Coney Island and the dust of traveling fairs. Seen in a gallery, what remains is their distilled essence: fields of color, pathways, circles, silhouettes, and a whisper of nostalgia.
Coney Island remains one source of that imagination. Following Ricco/Maresca’s 2006 exhibition Dreamland, Amuse returns to a world where entertainment was built as fantasy, spectacle, and escape. Game boards, toss targets, circus maquettes, photo-props, banners, and carved figures reveal amusement as something vivid and physical: a form of play, theater, and transformation.
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Vintage German Toy Catalog Illustrations
All works: ca. 1925 - 30. Cutout paper collage on paper with painted details • $ 1,000 ea. -
Concurrently on view in Gallery Two:
Gil Batle: Double Life
Visit the online viewing room here.
