FA-Q

About the Artist

Painted like he had nothing to lose.

Kevin Wendall — known as FA-Q — came out of No Se No, a Latino social club on the Lower East Side that became, without anyone planning it, one of the more honest spaces for art in 1980s New York. The Rivington School, as the scene around it came to be called, was not a school in any institutional sense. It was a bar, a wall, a performance, an argument. Visual art alongside singing alongside whatever else was happening. Society’s outcasts, as the regulars described themselves, doing what they wanted with no interest in the commercial gallery scene that was consuming the neighborhood above them.

FA-Q studied at the Cooper School of Art and Baldwin Wallace College, received grants, had artist residencies in Finland and Düsseldorf, and collaborated with Italian master Enrico Baj. He was, in other words, credentialed in the ways that mattered and dismissive of the ones that didn’t. His paintings — densely arranged, vivid colors, sharp lines — reward sustained attention in a way that salon-style hanging encourages and white cube presentation defeats.

FA-Q died in 2011. His estate continues through fa-qart.com. His presence at Lift Trucks is not nostalgia for the East Village or a curatorial statement about outsider art. Tom Christopher came up in the same New York. He knew the work. He put it on the wall.

“The movement embraced what the mainstream scene rejected — authentic, anarchist, deliberately uncommercial.”

ART WORLD CONFIDENTIAL • ON THE RIVINGTON SCHOOL