Why Is Everything A Rag is the first solo museum exhibition of the Stockholm-based artist Jockum Nordström in the United States. Children’s books, jazz and blues vinyl covers, collages, drawings, paintings, and paper sculptures collected from the start of his career through today figure in a practice animated by and built of visual vernacular. Inhabiting liminal spaces heralded as much by surrealism as by folk traditions, Nordström looks to the cultural, psychological, and physical margins of society. Positioning his audience as voyeurs—into derelict buildings, soundscapes, and private lives—Nordström uses the idea, as much as the aesthetic, of outsider art to develop an oeuvre of outlines—physical perimeters, cut-outs and scraps—creative edges of civilization.

Organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, Why Is Everything A Rag brings Nordström—for the first time—to the city that has shaped his artistic imagination since the early ‘90s and to the home of the music he continues to make as a member of the band, Joakim Ahlund & Jockum Nordström.

This exhibition is organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (CAC), and curated by Andrea Andersson, The Helis Foundation Chief Curator of Visual Arts at the CAC.