“Viva tu Vida en Loisaida,” silkscreen print, from Your House Is Mine, 1990

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Martin Wong, “Viva tu Vida en Loisaida,” 1990, silkscreen print, 20″ x 23″.

Martin Wong (1946–1999) depicted the Lower East Side landscape in countless oil paintings and other works. Through his dedicated engagement with local street artists, he built up an unrivaled collection of graffiti art, later donated to the Museum of the City of New York. His posthumous restrospective Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, at the Bronx Museum in 2016, was praised by critics like the New York Times‘ Holland Cotter, who termed Wong “one of our great urban visionaries.”

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BULLET SPACE EXHIBITION

Martin Wong

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Andrew Castrucci & Bullet Space: A Lower East Side Art Squat, 1980s & ’90s

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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.