Guitar Shop

24 Nov 2024-19 Jan 2025

PV 1 Dec 2024, 2-6pm

Overview

The Gallery of Everything is pleased to present Guitar Shop, a presentation of vernacular musical instruments from America and beyond. The exhibition is accompanied by the political collages and personal objects of Felipé Jesus Consalvos, a self-taught Cuban maker whose oeuvre was discovered posthumously.

Guitar Shop’s instruments – improvised banjos and box guitars, violins and tambourines – are more than just tools for making music. The movements of people – forced or otherwise – are described in new iterations of traditional forms: think of the Appalachian banjo and its West African predecessors, the akonting and ngoni, transported with enslaved people and long since ensconced in those wild hills. 

Reflecting the experiences of those who made, played, and passed them down through generations, instruments carry stories shaped by the collisions of cultures and the passage of history. Many here are testaments to human resilience, born in times and places where resources were limited but imagination flourished. Embodying narratives that might otherwise have been overlooked, each represents both a tangible piece of history and a song waiting to be played today. 

Born in Havana in 1891, emigrating to Miami around 1920, Felipé Jesus Consalvos made a living rolling cigars until his death circa 1960. It wasn’t until a garage sale in West Philadelphia in 1980 that his private oeuvre was discovered: a life’s work, spun from a life’s labour. 

Totalling 750 objects – photos, furniture, musical instruments – covered in ephemera including cigar labels from his day job, Consalvos's satirical collages used American clichés to hoist the culture on its own petard. Uniting material and metaphor, Consalvos’s practice complemented that of his (unwitting) contemporaries, like collagists Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell, while anticipating the humour of image-makers to come, like Sir Peter Blake, Jan Svankmajer and Terry Gilliam. 

Since its discovery, Consalvos’s work has been exhibited internationally, from Turin to Paris and Rotterdam to New York. It is part of prestigious collections including Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia), American Folk Art Museum (New York), and Harvard Art Museums (Boston). Presented alongside The Gallery of Everything's Guitar Shop, comprising hundreds of vernacular string instruments, Consalvos’s extraordinary, collaged guitars and violins are finally afforded the context they never had while he was alive.