Pundits today might deem that aesthetic “Afrofuturist,” though Ra existed long before such a category arrived to classify his art. Viewed together, Ra and his band’s handmade cover art epitomize what Chusid, in Art of Saturn ’s introduction, describes as an “idiosyncratic art form,” made up of singular artifacts offering a celestial reimagining of the Black narrative. It’s expensive, it’s highly competitive, and if you’re outbid, you experience common stages of loss and grief.”) (Chusid himself does not collect handmade Ra covers: “I hope to never develop the habit. If they refused to lend the jackets-we’re talking obsessive protectiveness-we accepted scans they provided, and gave specific instructions on how to do it correctly.” The scanning, image processing, and restoration work on these images was also completed with help from Barbara Economon, a digital media specialist at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. “We reached out to those we considered most sane and asked to borrow their sleeves for scanning. “There’s a worldwide network of Ra album fanatics,” he said. To source other sleeves, Chusid said, required some negotiation, to say the least. Art on Saturn ’s co-editor, Chris Reisman, is one such collector whose huge stockpile of Ra album covers made it into the book. Over the decades, a fierce collector’s market would form around these DIY sleeves. But compared to printed covers rolling off an automated press, the homemade covers contained the band members’ physical and creative DNA.” “Like any art form, some works were better than others. “Each sleeve became a unique work of art,” Chusid told Artnet News. Most had scant information about the album’s contents, much less the record’s title. Some covers featured collages, others black-and-white photos colored in with markers some carried haphazardly drawn geometric patterns, while others were striking for their spare abstractions. They continued to lean into such themes as Egyptian mysticism, space, and Black nationalism, drawing out Ra’s vision of Black culture as rooted in ancient traditions and bound for a cosmic future.Ī handmade Sun Ra album cover, from Sun Ra: Art on Saturn. This “ongoing arts and crafts project,” in Chusid’s words, would generate unknown numbers of covers, which were then sold at live events and through mail order. A pressing plant would ship blank record platters directly to the band’s Morton Street row house, where Ra’s crew would plug away with photos, stickers, felt-tip pens, paint, and glue, hand-crafting each protective pocket. To do so, he put himself and his Arkestra to work producing album art-manually. That decade, Ra had relocated his operations from New York to Philadelphia, where he recognized a need to create merchandise swiftly, though in limited quantities. More compelling, though, the volume compiles the far vaster quantity of record sleeves that were handmade by Ra and his bandmates in the ‘70s. Printed album covers for Secrets of the Sun and The Magic City, designed by Chris Hall and William White, from Sun Ra: Art on Saturn. They were designed by artists such as Chris Hall and Claude Dangerfield, whose creative processes are documented in the book. Chiefly, it features the sleeves of the 70 albums that Ra released on his independent record label, Saturn, from 1957 to 1988. It’s why Chusid, the exclusive administrator of Ra’s catalog, has edited and released Sun Ra: Art on Saturn, the first publication to focus on the artist’s cover art. “These covers,” in the estimation of Irwin Chusid, “belonged between covers.” They were otherworldly designs, forging a visually distinctive path where there was none before. Never content with simply being a jazzman, Ra would, from the late 1950s, unleash a stream of records with his group Arkestra that edged the genre into the realm of the avant-garde.Īnd he didn’t stop there: Ra’s groundbreaking music came packaged in similarly alluring album covers, which psychedelically melded his multitude of preoccupations from ancient Egyptian iconography to emerging sci-fi tropes. As an artist, Sun Ra was prone to restlessness.
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