Sun Ra</a> and his band the Arkestra began decorating their own record covers. Partially as an economical way to make small batches of LPs for sale at their concerts, and partly as a continuation of their pioneering DIY activity with their artist-run record label Saturn Records, Ra and his cohorts would gather together, using colored pens, pencils, paints, and collage to design unique jackets for their albums, offering them to the audience from the edge of the stage at the set break or after the show. The rarest of these used fragments of shower curtains from the legendary Sun Ra house in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in their elaborate collaged designs. These covers are of course now prized fetish objects. Many of them were compiled in the book Sun Ra: Art on Saturn: The Album Cover Art of Sun Ra’s Saturn Label (Fantagraphics, 2022), which situated the handmade covers in context with their more commercially (however still small-batch) produced, offset-printed counterparts.</p><p>In Nothing Is, organized by John Corbett and Albert <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Nothing-Is--Sun-Ra-and-Others--Covers/"/Artist/Markus-Oehlen/A3665067F2E45FC9">Oehlen for the JUBG in Köln and <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Nothing-Is--Sun-Ra-and-Others--Covers/"/Organization/Corbett-vs--Dempsey/59FA7DC7D8BA4EF8">Corbett vs. Dempsey</a> in Chicago, a wide range of contemporary artists from varying locations and backgrounds is invited to make their own handmade record covers for specific Sun Ra LPs, whether actual or fictional. The show takes its title from a Ra poem (itself reprinted on the ESP LP called Nothing Is):</p><p><br></p>" />