Kind of a cut-up
This New Yorker’s obsession is either shear madness or a load of fun. Take a look and see for yourself
T ALK about your cutting-edge exhibitions: Harley Spiller’s showing off his scissors. Some 200 of the 800 he owns — from the flimsy metal ones that pinched your fingers in grade school, to some awesome Korean choppers — are encased in the lobby of NoMad’s Ace Hotel New York, as part of this weekend’s Outsider Art Fair.
Since when is a self-billed “Inspector Collector” an “outsider artist”?
“His artistry is his collecting,” says Andrew Edlin, head of Wide Open Arts, which oversees the fair. “Harley’s a guy who sees beauty and intrigue in things others would deem mundane or uninteresting. He’s radically individual.”
This radical individual, now a 58-year-old arts administrator at downtown’s nonprofit Franklin Furnace, grew up in Buffalo, NY. His parents owned a sales promotion company, and their home was full of tchotchkes, from plastic foodstuffs to fake dynamite. As a boy, he started collecting pennies before graduating to pencils and football cards. He wasn’t interested in great players — just the ones with the best names, such as Jan Stenerud, Cookie Gilchrist.
But when he hit his teens, he stopped. “It was uncool,” he says. “You couldn’t get a girl by showing her your Emerson Boozer!”
That craving to collect returned in 1981 when he moved to the Upper West Side to work as a museum curator. One night, he heard a soft “shh” at the door and froze, thinking he was being robbed. Turns out, it was a Chinese takeout menu. Spiller, who never knew squid was a food, was smitten. He started collecting menus, and in 2016 sold some 10,000 of them for $40,000 to the University of Toronto. (Canadian academics, it seems, are tracing the history of Chinese food in America.)
But while menus can fit in a shoebox, other Spiller collections — magnets, neckties, bottles, objects that sound like Harley Spiller (such as an autograph from Phyllis Diller) — can’t. Which is why Spiller, who in 2006 married sculptor Micki Watanabe, keeps a place in Queens that he calls the Museum of Choking Hazards.
“My wife says, ‘Don’t bring anything in the house! Nothing more in the house!’ ” Spiller says of the Upper East Side studio they share with their 9-year-old son, Hiro. And so he often donates his collections, as he did his trove of Mr. T memorabilia, now housed at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, the actor’s hometown.
You don’t need to be rich to be a collector, says Spiller, a roving professor who teaches what he calls “storytelling with objects.” Much of what he collects is free, or otherwise considered unimportant — but not to him. And the scissors show he calls “Scixibit” is a cut above anything he’s shown before: Since it’s in a hotel lobby, it’s open 24 hours a day.
“Nobody’s got an excuse for missing it!” he says.
Outsider Art Fair runs through Sunday at the Metropolitan Pavilion. 125 W. 18th St.; Outsider ArtFair.com. “Scixibit” runs through Jan. 31 at the Ace Hotel New York, 20 W. 29th St.