The stuffed press kit for the Museum of Modern Art‘s 1984 blockbuster exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art proudly boasted that the exhibition was the first to “juxtapose modern and tribal objects in the light of informed art history.”…
What is included in this Gallery 98 newsletter may well be all that survives of Insure the Life of An Ant, an innovative work of conceptual art by J. Michael Malloy. Shown originally at OK Harris Gallery in April 1972, this provocative example of participatory art was inspired by the…
Items of art ephemera, such as announcement cards, posters, press releases, gallery catalogues, low-price multiples, and other art-related items designed primarily for short term use, can tell fascinating stories. This Gallery 98 newsletter features six items that were selected simply because we find them interesting. What you see here is just the tip…
From our newsletter archives — Originally published July 15, 2021. Two new items added. Cynthia Sley and Uli Rimkus Behind the Bar at Tin Pan Alley c. 1981, Photograph by Keri Pickett. Courtesy Pickett Pictures LLC Best known now as the inspiration for the fictional bar Hi Hat…
This Gallery 98 newsletter spotlights two artists, M. Henry Jones (1957 – 2022) and Roger Lannes de Montebello (1908 – 1986), caught on the far side of this digital divide. In the case of both artists, their creative ambitions exceeded the capabilities of the analog technology that was available to…
Gallery 98 can now offer over 50 of the Eye’s original 72 issues. Gallery 98 has recently acquired a large collection of the East Village Eye, the much-coveted independent DIY newspaper founded in 1979 by the late Leonard Abrams (1954 – 2023). During the 1980s, when the East Village was the…
Back in 1982, Mary Boone was celebrated on the cover New York Magazine as the “New Queen of The Art Scene.” But in 2019 her career abruptly ended when she was forced to close her gallery, and serve six months in prison for tax fraud. Now Boone has returned, serving as the celebrity co-curator (along…
Wigstock (Woodstock with a drag twist) began in 1984, when Lady Bunny and others from the Pyramid nightclub, spontaneously decided to put on a show in Tompkins Square Park. From that point on, Bunny took control and developed Wigstock into an annual downtown event that continued for over twenty years until 2005 with only…
Richard Hambleton New York, an exhibition, organized in 2009 by Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld (whose mother was editor of French Vogue), and Andy Valmorbida in collaboration with Giorgio Armani, heralded a major career comeback. Hambleton was embraced by upscale fashionistas as his retrospective traveled for two years to elegant venues in New…
Left to right: Blade, a subway art pioneer; Tovey Halleck at the Rivington School Sculpture Garden made out of junk; Ann Messner with bolt cutters used to break into an unoccupied city owned building used to mount the Real Estate Show…
In the 1970s Martha Cooper was photographing children on the Lower East Side for the New York Post when she first discovered graffiti: “You would see a bunch of legible but unintelligible letters on the wall…I found out it was kids’ names.” That revelation began a 50-year obsession for Cooper who started meeting…
From 1997 – 2002, Hoppe enjoyed an ideal situation painting views of the Hamptons, one of New York’s most scenic and affluent summer retreats. These photos, the basis for the paintings, not only capture the beauty of the Hamptons, they also reveal the artist’s fascinating working process.
When local Los Angeles artist Edward Kienholz debuted Back Seat Dodge at the Dwan Gallery in 1964, the life-size sculpture with two mannequins simulating sex in the back seat of a car inspired both chuckles and praise.
In the 1970s and 80s, Hungarian-born Edit DeAk (née Deák) was an influential artworld participant widely respected as a writer, curator and friend to artists. Her beginnings were in Art-Rite, a low budget magazine that she co-founded and co-edited with Walter Robinson from 1973 through 1978.
From our newsletter archives — Originally published September 2, 2021; new images and text added. Portraits of Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and Richard Prince from their respective issues of Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin. 1992-1996. Selected issues from the 1990s of the German Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) magazine are today collector items because of the…
This week’s newsletter is about an episode of art patronage when tens of millions of dollars were spent to support and preserve works of art that did not conform to conventional categories of collecting. The story begins in 1973, when the German gallerist Heiner Friedrich moves to New York, then travels to…
Houston’s embrace of art can be credited in part to John and Dominique de Menil… The taste for innovative new art quickly spread amongst other wealthy Texans, and the 1970s saw the opening of a number of galleries specializing in contemporary art. The Texas Gallery (originally founded as Contract Graphics in 1971), was perhaps…
We usually devote our weekly newsletter to items available for purchase. This week we’re doing the opposite: the items listed below are not available since they have all recently sold. As Gallery 98 has listings for over 8,000 items, many linger on our site for months, and even years. Collectors…
There are so many historically interesting items among the 8,500 examples of art ephemera posted on Gallery 98 that it is sometimes difficult to decide what to feature in our weekly newsletter. This assortment of favorites was chosen to appeal to a broad range of tastes and interests. Each of these items tells…
In the mid-1970s, British artist James Collins explored the concept of the male gaze in a series of exhibitions featuring large-format photos of himself staring at women.
Her participation in punk at its most extreme, upended her career in the 1990s, but over the last decade, she successfully reclaimed her place as one of the key artist-photographers of the 1970s and 80s. Her book Punks, Poets & Provocateurs (2015) established her as one of the best portrait…
The counterculture that emerged in the United States in the 1960s had a strong impact not only on popular culture, but also on different branches of the fine arts. Thomas Crow’s new book The Artist in the Counterculture explores how these different currents interconnected in California from the 1960’s to…
In many ways Blade (Steven Ogburn) is the quintessential artist to come out of the early years of subway graffiti. In the 1970s when graffiti was still a game for city kids to compete against each other to see who would become the most famous, Blade was the self-proclaimed “King…
In the words of curator Roger Gastman, “Before New York City made graffiti world famous, BLADE was one of the people who made it famous in New York.” BLADE (Steven Ogburn) was only fifteen years old when in 1972 he tagged his first train. By 1974 he was painting full…
The film industry has the Oscar, Broadway has the Tony, so why can’t avant-garde performance artists also receive awards? That was the reasoning behind “The ARTIES,” an award ceremony/fundraiser initiated by the downtown alternative space, Franklin Furnace on its 10th Anniversary in 1986.
Francesco Clemente was one of the leaders in the return to figurative painting in the 1980s which is variously grouped under the labels “Neo-Expressionism,” “New Imagery” and the “Transavantgarde.”…
Widely promoted and exhibited in the 1970s and 80s, P&D has been generally ignored since then. This may be because the beauty and decorative qualities of P&D concealed its most radical elements — the movement’s political roots in feminism, and its willingness to embrace multicultural influences.
A press release from Christie’s auction house spotlights Marlene Dumas’ 1997 painting Miss January, and predicts that with an estimate of $12 – $18 million it will become the most expensive work by a living female artist when sold on Wednesday May 14th.
We know the hyper-realist painter Curt Hoppe from his Downtown Portraits series. This newsletter focuses on an earlier phase of Hoppe’s career, the five years from 1997 to 2002 when his subject was the Hamptons.
Art ephemera is primarily a by-product of advertising and promotion. At Gallery 98 our main focus is on exhibition announcement cards and gallery posters, but we also have an interest in the advertisements that galleries place in art magazines. For galleries wanting to advertise, Artforum, with its large international circulation,…
Only a few more days left to see ABC No Rio 45 Years, an exhibition at the Emily Harvey Foundation, (537 Broadway, 2nd Floor) that traces the unlikely story of a long-running, Lower East Side art space famous for both its art and adversarial politics.
COLAB’s ever-changing nexus of thirty to sixty artists included many who later achieved individual fame, but the group’s real contribution was the philosophy of creative engagement it advanced through collective, do-it-yourself actions.
When the artist group Colab was founded in 1977 it was conceived more as a mutual aid society than as an art movement. Its premise was simple: create a legal non-profit so that artists can get access to government grants to finance group projects. Colab membership was open to any artist…
The retrospective exhibition ABC No Rio 45 Years at the Emily Harvey Foundation (537 Broadway, 2nd Floor) includes No Rio’s entire history with sections on the Colab period. No Rio has been run since the late-1990s by a collective of punks, anarchists, squatters and artists, and is now known internationally…
In the mid-1980s, as gentrification encroached on the East Village, the neighborhood’s eastern fringe remained a lawless landscape of abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn lots.
In the course of fourteen years in New York’s Soho arts’ district, Deitch Projects completely reconfigured people’s expectations about art. Its founder Jeffrey Deitch was already a well-known art advisor, curator and critic when in 1996 he decided to open his own gallery, where he remained committed to the populist and…
Gallery 98 keeps adding new items to our inventory. Recently, we have been fortunate to acquire a collection of quality posters, some signed by the artists who created them. What makes for a top-tier poster? In addition to looking good when hanging on a wall, a poster should also have something interesting…
Christo, first alone, and then in collaboration with his wife Jeanne-Claude, was a singular artist who achieved extraordinary worldwide success. Like other artists in the 1960s connected with the European art movement Nouveau Réalisme, Christo moved away from painting in favor of working with found objects.
It was an art world where originality was prized, and just about anything, in any media, could be considered art. Carson soon established himself as one of the scene’s most extreme artists, a creator of unusual works and performances that even now, fifty years later, stand out for their originality.
This is a show filled with unusual masterpieces: psychologically-charged drawings that hint at impropriety; ephemera from guerrilla performances staged in Soho galleries without permission; the notorious rectal-realist paintings created with a paintbrush in his behind; and objects connected with ventures like Carson’s LaRocka Modeling Agency and LaRocka Nite Club (later…
Art writer Edit deAk was a regular at the Mudd Club, and Dubbed in Glamour, a three-night “extravaganza” of performances, music, film and slide shows, was her attempt to bring the creativity of the nightlife scene into a more mainstream art setting.
There is more to the story of 105 Hudson, however, than its role in the gentrification of TriBeCa. For a brief period in the mid-70s it was the key venue where one could experience the radical changes that influenced the development of art in the late 1970s and 80s. Three…
Created over a two-year period in an abandoned lot on the Lower East Side, the Rivington School Sculpture Garden was a chaotic collection of metal scraps welded together and reaching up to 20 feet high. It was the work of multiple artists, but to call it a collaboration is too…
In 1985, No Se No artists took over the empty lot on the corner of Rivington and Forsyth, transforming it into a crammed, junkyard-like Sculpture Garden that would become the Rivington School’s best-known manifestation.
The sudden passing of Walter Robinson last weekend caused quite a stir on social media. More than just a successful artist and art writer, the engaging and long active Robinson was a point of connection for several generations of downtown artists. He literally knew everyone. …
Although there were earlier museums devoted to African American culture, the creation of the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1968 had special significance. In part this was due to its Harlem location, but it was also on account of its emphasis on art rather than history.
While words appear in the work of Cubist, Surrealist and other early 20th century artists, it wasn’t until the latter half of the century with the rise of Pop and Conceptual art, that words and text became a common motif of art. For those interested in this kind of work,…
If you want to own just one item of art ephemera, a good choice might be a gallery invitation featuring a portrait of your favorite artist. This type of card has long been used as a way to advertise exhibitions, especially if the artist is well-known or has a distinctive…
Gallery goers entered a space similar to a voting booth where they encountered a metal box containing a live ant. Their dilemma: Should they push a button and kill the ant, or should they allow the ant to live?…
While uptown galleries in wealthy neighborhoods could be intimidating to some, the SoHo galleries with their clean, open spaces seemed welcoming. The appreciation of art, an activity previously reserved for the enjoyment of the elite, now became a popular pastime enjoyed by large, diverse audiences.
Although Philippe de Montebello, the former Metropolitan Museum director is well-known, few people have heard about his father Roger de Montebello and his life-long creative obsession with three-dimensional photography.
As we move into 2025, Gallery 98 intends to keep things moving by incorporating new formats in our social media efforts. Earlier this year we introduced short videos for use on TikTok, and as Instagram reels. Given Gallery 98’s ambition to present the history of art and culture in the 1970s and…
Gallery 98 is primarily a site for purchasing vintage art ephemera, but it is also intended for researchers wanting to learn more about the art world of the 1970s to 1990s. Each week we send out an email newsletter that highlights and contextualizes important additions to our inventory. Here are seven of…
Bettie Ringma and Marc H Miller Selling Polaroids in the Bars of Amsterdam, 1980. Bilingual (English and Dutch). Hardcover. 216 pages. Published by Lecturis (NL). 2023. All books ordered before Christmas will be signed by Miller with a memorial inscription for Ringma, who died in 2018.
The exhibition “Above Ground: The Martin Wong Graffiti Collection” at the Museum of the City of New York has reminded us of the large quantities of top-tier graffiti-related ephemera that have passed through Gallery 98 over the years.
The holiday season is a time to reach out to friends. Most people are content to send greeting cards created by companies like Hallmark, but artist Kiki Smith has for many years reconnected with friends by sending photographs of her own art. Gallery 98 has recently obtained ten of these…
Fast, the group exhibition at the Alexander Milliken Gallery, from June 11 to July 15, 1982, is now remembered primarily for its inclusion of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s skull painting (Untitled 1982), which later fetched $110,497,500 at a 2017 auction at Sotheby’s and remains the most expensive of all of Basquiat’s works.
People have many reasons to be interested in art ephemera — a type of collectible that also has the advantage of being small, easy to store, and modestly priced. Many collectors follow specific artists, but others just appreciate catchy images that they can casually display on a bookcase or coffee…
For researchers and scholars, Gallery 98 provides free and easy access to hard-to-find, primary documents like gallery announcement cards, posters, catalogues and magazine advertisements. Collectors of art ephemera will be pleased with the breadth and richness of Gallery 98’s holdings, and the many ways you can search for items.
When the artist group Colab was founded in 1978 it was conceived more as a mutual aid society than as an art movement. Colab can be credited with helping to re-direct artworld priorities towards themes of inclusion and social engagement. Because many women artists were part of Colab, feminist ideas were…
“A More Stores” (as the COLAB stores were called) became yearly events with sympathetic galleries providing artists with the necessary retail space. In 1982, the idea went global when COLAB members Stefan Eins and Jenny Holzer set up a Fashion Moda Store at Documenta 7, the international art fair in Germany. Keith Haring took the idea a…
In addition to making the subway chalk drawings that quickly won him fame, Haring also promoted his artistic vision by handing out xeroxes, buttons, posters and stickers featuring his ever-expanding repertoire of images.
For Keith Haring the line separating fine art and ephemera was thin. His meteoritic career was marked by an unrelenting succession of works cutting across every medium and category of art, but his approach to making art was remarkably consistent whether he was making a large outdoor mural, a commercial…
At one point, Gallery 98 had a near complete collection of the East Village Eye. Many of the most popular of these issues are now back in stock. Gallery 98 has recently been able to re-stock some of the rarest and most sought-after issues of the East Village Eye, an independent, D.I.Y.
Gallery 98 spotlights four 1980s galleries with exceptional exhibition records. Of the four, 303 Gallery, which recently celebrated its 35th anniversary, is the only one to have survived the decade. The history of these groundbreaking galleries can be tracked through the art ephemera they produced for each of their exhibitions.
Gallery 98 has always been particularly strong in 1970’s and 80’s art ephemera from downtown NYC. Featured below are items from ABC No Rio’s first five years. This was the time when the gallery was affiliated with the artist group COLAB, and was central to an evolving art world that put a premium on art connected to social and…
This promotional mailer for Paul Tschinkel’s Art/new york, A Video Magazine on Art is a reminder of how dynamic the contemporary art scene was in the 1980s. The portable video camera was still a novelty and artists were eager to see how they and their art looked on television. A new generation of…
With the beginning this week of the 2024-2025 art season, one topic sure to be of interest is the connection between art, science and technology. We have here spontaneously selected items from our inventory that show some of the various ways in which art and technology have intermixed. We have…
The items that have been selected for this week’s newsletter all fit into that category: each one highlights a still relevant thought-provoking subject related to art, art world politics, and life.
Rarely screened today, The Foreigner lives on primarily through the excellent on-set photographs taken by Fernando Natalici to publicize the film. Gallery 98 has a number of vintage resin-coated prints made from the original negatives by Natalici in the early 1990s when The Foreigner was first released as a VHS video. All prints are signed and annotated by Natalici.
The No Wave and Independent films produced in downtown New York in the 1970s and 1980s are an intriguing hybrid art form that intermingles music, fashion, performance and visual art.
In the 1980s culture-loving New Yorkers not only attended gallery openings, theater events and movies, but also participated in New York’s flourishing nightclub scene. While music and dancing were the main attraction, clubs also hosted art exhibitions, performances, fashion, film and video. During these years, almost every gallery opening, film…
Hoppe will be at Howl! Happening this Sunday, August 11, at 3 PM, to sign copies of the catalog for Downtown Portraits. Copies of the 100-page catalogue with essays by Marc H Miller, Carlo McCormick, and Walter Robinson, are also available for purchase through the Howl online store.
The groundbreaking at the site of the proposed new ABC No Rio arts center. From the article “How the Anarchists at ABC No Rio Got the City to Build Them an Arts Center on the Lower East Side.” From the online publication Hell Gate (owned and…
Daniel J Martinez, “I Can’t Ever Imagine Wanting To Be White”, Metal Button, Whitney Biennial, 1993. Most of the buttons distributed at the Whitney Museum included only fragments of Martinez’s message. This is one of the rare examples that included the complete phrase. The writing…
These days it’s hard to think about anything besides politics. Here are some items from Gallery 98’s inventory that illustrate the ways in which art ephemera and politics have been linked in the past. Back in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan was the art world’s bête noir, and many of…
Five years after they were first publicly exhibited, Curt Hoppe’s Downtown Portraits (all painted between 2010 and 2019) feel very different from how they felt before. While this collection of 25 larger-than-life, acrylic on canvas portraits will continue to be perceived by most viewers as a celebration of downtown culture in the 1970s,…
Gallery 98 is now a stand-alone online entity offering a full range of art ephemera from the 1960s through the first years of the 21st Century. However, when the gallery first went online around twelve years ago it was simply a “store” designed to offer objects connected to the website 98 Bowery,…
You’ll find here uncommon rare items from our inventory of vintage art publications. In the 1960s one of the favorite hangouts for NYC artists was the bar and restaurant Max’s Kansas City where owner Mickey Ruskin was famous for trading credit for art. A list of items sold at auction in…
What makes for a collectible gallery announcement card? The key quality is a powerful iconic image by a well-known artist that evokes the concerns of the particular time the exhibition took place. Lyle Ashton Harris’ 1997 invitation card clearly fits the bill with its compelling picture of two sexually ambiguous black youths from his White Face Series. It perfectly…
ART/new york: A Video Magazine on Art, The 1982 – 1983 Art Season, Keith Haring, Nam June Paik, Brice Marden, Lee Krasner, Julian Schnabel, Robert Rauschenberg, 1983. Folded card. Size: 10.5 x 12.25 inches This promotional mailer for Paul Tschinkel’s Art/new york, A…
Anyone studying the art of the late 1970s and 1980s will soon encounter the artist group Collaborative Projects Inc., best known simply as Colab. Established as a not-for-profit corporation in 1978, Colab’s original purpose was to provide artists with direct access to newly available government grants. But the group soon…
Perlman’s portraits, executed with a painting method typically used by children, fit broadly into the 1980s wave of neo-expressionism but they go way beyond that context.
At the heart of Gallery 98’s online exhibition of letters and ephemera from the estate of art patron Anne MacDonald (1942 – 2018), is the legendary figure Sam Wagstaff, an early mentor of MacDonald, who later became famous as a collector of photography, and as the lover and supporter of…
Gallery 98 has acquired a collection of letters, gallery cards and books from the estate of Anne MacDonald. All of the items connect to Sam Wagstaff, a collector of photography, and to his partner, Robert Mapplethorpe. Objects from this collection (along with a few from our inventory) are now featured in the…
It appears that the art of courtroom illustration may have declined since its high point in the early 1970s when the Watergate trials were must-see television, and cameras were universally prohibited in America’s courthouses.
To provide sufficient visuals for the substantial airtime allotted to the story each night, Reiter made multiple sketches a day: close-up portraits, as well as wide-angle views of the courtroom incorporating as many as 28 figures.
Anne MacDonald was an enthusiastic promoter of experimental artists advancing new forms of art-making and innovative ways to expand art audiences. This newsletter focuses on her magazine Shift, that published 15 issues from 1987 to 1993. …
We are reposting this newsletter in response to the success of our short video (posted below) about Roger de Montebello, which recently was viewed 120,000 times and received 17,000 likes on TikTok.
THIS COMING SUNDAY, April 21st at 2:30pm. Meet Gallery 98’s Marc H Miller at NYU Bobst Library, where he will be presenting a book featuring the photographs that he and Bettie Ringma took in Amsterdam, 1980. The editor of the book, Leonor Faber-Jonker, will also be participating.
From our newsletter archives — Originally published April 1, 2021. New York Post, “Dung Ho! Retired teacher defaces infamous painting”, Newspaper, Friday December 17, 1999. Dennis Heiner, a retired school teacher, defaced Chris Ofili’s painting, The Holy Virgin Mary, part of the Sensation exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Ofili’s painting combined elephant dung…
Posters inexpensively printed on offset presses have always been popular with art enthusiasts. Most of these posters were created by galleries and museums to advertise exhibitions. Some, on the other hand, were designed specifically to be sold in museum shops and poster stores as an affordable alternative to signed…
Collectors of art ephemera usually favor cards connected to their favorite artists or to themes of special interest. Displayed on a shelf, or hanging on a wall in a small frame, vintage cards and flyers can either evoke past memories or present interests. Some cards might also have historic value…
One of the easiest ways to sort through the 7,312 items currently listed on the Gallery 98 website is to go to our Artists Page. Here hundreds of artists are listed alphabetically with links that will take you to pages showing all our holdings related to that particular artist.
While few of these films were commercial successes, they provide a glimpse of the passions that fueled the East Village art scene during a creative highpoint. These low-budget, Super-8 productions embody the period’s do-it-yourself ethos, as well as, the fusion of art, music and club culture that animated the downtown…
Gallery 98 is fortunate to have recently acquired a substantial collection of catalogues and books by Richard Prince. Below you will find a small selection of these publications, as well as some of Prince’s gallery cards that were already in our inventory. What emerges is a mini-portrait of Prince, one of the most innovative,…
Born and raised in Austria, Eins came to NYC in 1967, and settled into a small storefront in Soho in 1972 when it was still a deserted manufacturing district. When art galleries began moving into the area, Eins hid his bed behind a screen, and turned his live-in studio into a D.I.Y. exhibition…
As the founder of two idiosyncratic, do-it-yourself art spaces, Stefan Eins played a central role in shaking up the insular, overly-intellectualized art world of the 1970s in favor of a more socially-engaged, multi-cultural art with broader public appeal. …
The cards featured here date from the early 1990s when Gagosian mostly exhibited older established male artists. They all include images of artists in their studios, emphasizing their fame, and the drama and romance of art making.
The dramatic expansion of art as an upscale commodity in the 2000s is directly reflected in art ephemera. Leading the trend was the Gagosian Gallery whose multiple venues in the US and Europe exhibited some of the most commercially successful artists.
As we searched our inventory for something special for Black History Month, the catalogue for Richard Powell’s 1989 exhibition “The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism” provided the necessary inspiration. Gallery 98 has assembled a collection of related ephemera.
The First (And Only) Annual Arties, 1986. Organized by Franklin Furnace, Awards for Performance Artists, Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Nam June Paik, and others, Cover Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe.
The rapid growth of the city’s non-profit art spaces was rooted in a shortage of galleries and other exhibition venues. But there was also an emerging political awareness that some groups were being systematically excluded from mainstream art. Fortuitously, newly available government funding for the arts happily coincided with a…
Every art announcement card is unique. Each promotes a specific exhibition taking place at a particular place and time. An important decision is made about which image to include: A work in the exhibition? A detail of a work? Or maybe a portrait of the artist? The fun of collecting these cards lies in…
Colette worked without inhibition. Acting out an inner-world of fantasies she began making photographic self-portraits, creating soft fabric environments in which she was often a crucial living presence, and exhibiting self-referential hybrid works that combined sculpture, painting, and photography.
There are many reasons to be interested in art ephemera — a type of collectible that has the advantage of being small, easy to store, and modestly priced. Many collectors follow specific artists, while others appreciate catchy images that they can casually display on a bookcase or coffee tape.
The 1988 announcement card from a Metro Pictures exhibition featuring eleven successful women artists illustrates the gender diversification that was slowly taking hold in the art world in the 1980s. This demographic shift was especially noticeable amongst the artists associated with the then still unnamed “Pictures Generation” art movement which…
See all of Gallery 98’s newsletters on our Newsletter Archive page A lot has happened at Gallery 98 over the last year. Most significantly, we have introduced a redesigned website that not only looks and functions better, but also includes a cart that makes purchasing…
There are many reasons to treasure art ephemera. It can be an item of art historical significance; maybe it’s an announcement card for a favorite artist; or perhaps it touches on a theme that’s personally important to you. All of Gallery 98’s holiday suggestions fall into one or more of these categories.
Selling Polaroids is a picture book for many audiences. Drinkers and dive-bar aficionados will certainly be pleased. But it is also for fans of Amsterdam and the libertine spirit that the city continues to embody today. Mostly though, it is a book celebrating the freewheeling lifestyle that artists enjoyed in the late 1970s and early 80s, a…
Alice Denney enjoyed nothing more than causing a ruckus by exhibiting challenging new art in “boring old Washington.” We first met in 1974 when I moved to Washington for a year, and art-world acquaintances suggested I contact her. Alice loved action — giving parties, collecting art by young artists, and…
Last week’s opening of the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines (closing March 31, 2024) is a reminder of the important role that the photocopy machine played in the creation of new modes of art and art ephemera. While the technology used in copy machines dates back to…
This week’s newsletter features an eclectic group of items. The artists created in a range of styles — expressionism, pop, no wave, cartoon satire, and photo journalism. There is also a wide range in what we identify as art ephemera, including familiar formats like announcement cards and press releases, as well as artist books, artist-designed advertisements, an…
Thanks in part to our new high-visibility website, Gallery 98 is increasingly being approached by artists and galleries who want their history to be part of our ever-expanding collection of art ephemera. Recently, we were fortunate to obtain a large collection of announcement cards from the Texas Gallery, courtesy of its principal owner Fredericka…
There is no shortage of treasures buried in Gallery 98’s extensive inventory of close to 7,000 items. Each one of these four items captures a different moment and direction in art. All have stories to tell. Richard Lippold, Sculpture for Four Seasons Restaurant, Signed Card, 1961 Richard Lippold, The Four Seasons,…
Whether you’re interested in a specific artist, an art movement like graffiti, or how art reflects political and social issues, you can quickly find what you are looking for on Gallery 98’s swift new website. Our inventory of art ephemera keeps growing — currently there are 6,961 items posted, and we…
Gallery 98 is fortunate to have recently acquired a collection of early Jenny Holzer items from 1979-82, a fertile period when Holzer first developed important aspects of her art. These were also the years when Holzer was an active participant in Collaborative Projects Inc. (COLAB), an artist’s group, that like Holzer, shared an interest in…
For those interested in the history of art, the cards, posters and catalogs created in conjunction with past exhibitions provide a way to relive the art experience as it originally unfolded. These vintage collectibles not only provide documentation of specific art-world events, they also contextualize art in the social and commercial structure that gives art its fullest…
New York’s nightclub scene in the 1970s and 1980s is legendary today for its creativity, as well, its hedonism and debauchery. Studio 54 (1977), the Mudd Club (1978), Club 57 (1979), Danceteria (1979), and the Limelight (1983) were the early clubs that set the tone. AREA opened in September 1983 and was part of a second wave, yet…
Jean-Michel Basquiat and AREA owner Eric Goode from the book Area: 1983–1987 authored by Eric Goode & Jennifer Goode, photograph by Valerie Shaff, published by Abrams, 2013 For the talented and prolific Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1985 shaped up to be a banner year. In February, his portrait was on the cover of The…
Similar to the way paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat have played a key role in the frenzy surrounding contemporary high-end art auctions, the same is happening in the more limited market of vintage contemporary art ephemera. The cards, posters and publications that feature Basquiat and chart the important moments in his…
Every example of art ephemera tells a story, and sometimes, when two items connect, the story can get very interesting. That’s certainly the case with two items currently in Gallery 98’s inventory: a poster featuring a photo of Richard Serra’s public sculpture TWU (the initials for the Transit Workers Union), and a copy of Franklin Furnaces’ magazine Flue with…
When Stefan Eins opened the art space Fashion Moda in the South Bronx in 1978, he hoped that the unlikely setting, one of the country’s most devastated neighborhoods, would stir the creativity of his Downtown peers.
During its ten-year run as a gallery from 1986–1995, Psychedelic Solution provided a populist alternative to art styles found in other galleries. It specialized in works by Rick Griffin, Robert Williams, Robert Crumb and the many other accomplished artists who can be credited with pioneering what is now known as psychedelic…
Expanding our inventory of vintage posters by top artists from the last decades of the 20th Century is an ongoing process here at Gallery 98. We are currently photographing and processing a large collection of posters. As a taste of what is to come, here are three favorites. Each is…
For several years, Gallery 98 has been puzzled by a piece of mail art in our inventory, originally sent to the offices of Artforum in 1974. The piece consists of the front page of the LA Times of February 28, 1974, with a lead story on Tony Shafrazi’s vandalism of Pablo Picasso’s…
Gallery 98 has been sorting through our Andy Warhol ephemera with the goal of dividing it into two online collections. This first of these features items from before the artist’s death in February 1987. The second looks at posthumous Warhol ephemera from the time of his death to the…
Some art ephemera ages especially well. One example is this vintage 1980 poster for “Dubbed in Glamour” advertising three nights of performances at the Kitchen in Soho.
In 1982 the idea of the DIY artist store went mainstream when the upscale German exhibition documenta 7 asked Stefan Eins & Jenny Holzer to create a Fashion Moda Store.
Gallery 98 showcases selected issues of Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) magazine from the 1990s, featuring cover designs and picture spreads created by artists Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, and Richard Prince.
Highlights include a rare collection of collaborative posters from COLAB’s Talk is Cheap exhibition and Lady Pink’s poster from Your House is Mine. Visit Gallery 98’s Poster Page for additional items.