Vintage Colorforms set wall
96” each wall
Fun foods set wall
Secret room made from fruitcakes set wall
CURATOR’S NOTE: “In the same shared studio warehouse where Archie Bunker’s living room set was stored, I discovered face down in the next aisle a puppet from the joyful and ground-breaking television series Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Nearby, a mountain of caved-in cardboard production boxes were stacked so high that lower boxes had dejectedly burst open. My gut told me this occurred beyond the watchful eye of the show’s visionary creator Paul Reubens, so I pitched his business manager on a scenario that would find some pieces being elevated from their current woeful situation of being in studio storage after series wrap (think: death row), to my own best case opportunity of pieces being restored by Hollywood artisans, repaired by museum conservators, and stored in a climate & light controlled space (think: the governor staying your execution, then throwing you an ice cream party). Two years later, I would watch Paul walk over to the very spot, nearly unrecognizable with a fashion-forward three-day beard and in tasteful casual ware. He began to perform a triage of sorts, pulling a careworn piece from its dirty, disheveled boxes, and assigning it to a ‘keep,' ‘goodwill,’ or ‘dump’ pile. Apparently, my role this day would be to convince the notorious PWH to redirect pieces from these piles to one sanctioned for ‘Comisar.’ During the dig and over lunch, I would learn Pee-wee alter-ego Paul was singularly dedicated to his viewers to the extent he himself approved every toy placed on set (and not before playing with them to ensure quality control). In turn, he gleaned I was architecting a future for TV materials to be collected, cared for & celebrated as high art. After lunch, I told Paul there wasn’t much reason for me to return to the warehouse, given that he still had such a strong connection to the pieces he brought to life for the series. Paul quietly urged me to return with him, and true to his word, he cleared a space for pieces he would cull from his ‘dump’ and ‘keep’ piles and move them over to mine. Half-talking to himself, he mumbled what was he going to do with it all, find the time to repair it, and who knows, he might call me in a year to take it all. Paul was professional and focused throughout our day together, with no trace of the curious, childlike visitor that inhabited his body to the delight of an international audience. With one exception: In the late afternoon as the heat warmed the tin building to a boil, a gru ff forklift operator grunted for us to move out of the aisle, and as he rolled by, Paul pulled a Miss Yvonne dress out of a box, then yelled out as Pee-wee: ‘Hey, what size dress do you wear?’ punctuated by the most precocious laugh in the history of broadcast television.”
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