Mary Boone Gallery:
A History in Art Ephemera
Mary Boone’s decision to close her galleries as she gets ready to begin serving a 30-month jail sentence for tax evasion, brings to a halt the storied reign of one of New York’s most public and successful dealers. Boone rose rapidly from gallery girl at the Bykert Gallery in the 1970s to being heralded in 1982 as “The New Queen of the Art Scene” on the cover of New York magazine. During the years that Soho was the art center, her gallery was one of the most prominent. She later expanded into new spaces on Fifth Avenue (1996) and then to Chelsea (2000).
Boone was strategic, persuasive, and she had an eye for talent. All three of these qualities came into play when in late 1977 she launched her gallery in a tiny ground-floor space in Soho’s most prestigious building, 420 West Broadway. Her gallery was small but it was close to some of the art world’s top dealers and she was soon collaborating with her upstairs neighbor, the legendary Leo Castelli.
Julian Schnabel’s two gallery exhibition at the Boone Gallery and Leo Castelli Gallery in 1981 was a major event that not only launched Schnabel’s career, but also brought attention to Boone’s gallery and helped publicize “neo-expressionism” as the most prominent new art style of the 80’s. A year later in 1982 Boone and Castelli successfully coordinated exhibitions again, this time with David Salle.
The Boone Gallery would secure its place in the art world when it moved across the street from 420 to 417 West Broadway transforming a large garage space into an elegant minimalist gallery. Here she continued to represent Schnabel and Salle along with others like Eric Fischl, Ross Bleckner, and for a brief period Jean-Michel Basquiat. She also had strong European connections through her then husband Michael Werner, a prominent German art dealer whose name appeared alongside Boone’s on the gallery door in the mid-80s. Neo-expressionism as an international style was enlarged by exhibitions of German artists Sigmar Polke, Jörg Immendorf and the Italian artist Francesco Clemente.
Gallery 98 has dug deep into its inventory of announcement cards, posters and art publications from the 1980s and 90s to assemble this online exhibition spotlighting some of the most important moments in the history of the Mary Boone Gallery. While most of the artists she is associated with will continue exhibiting elsewhere (Ross Bleckner is currently showing at the Petzel Gallery), it is hard to imagine a Chelsea art stroll without a stop at her gallery.
From the Collection
• Downtown Galleries
• Expressionism
• Julian Schnabel
• Leo Castelli Gallery
• Mary Boone Gallery
• Posters
• Soho/Tribeca Galleries
$450
Sold
• Artist Portraits
• David Salle
• Downtown Galleries
• Gallery Exhibition Cards
• Mary Boone Gallery
• New York City
• Robin Winters
• Soho/Tribeca Galleries
Sold
• African Diaspora
• David Salle
• Expressionism
• Gallery Exhibition Cards
• Jean-Michel Basquiat
• Mary Boone Gallery
Sold
• Downtown Galleries
• Gallery Exhibition Cards
• Jean-Michel Basquiat
• Mary Boone Gallery
• Soho/Tribeca Galleries
Sold
Sold
$100
Sold
$50
$125
$100
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Andy Warhol Ephemera: Cards, Posters, Magazines, Photos (before Feb. 22, 1987)
CollectionsGallery 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… -
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Guerrilla Girls: Feminist Street Posters, 1985–1991
CollectionsWhen the Guerrilla Girls began wheatpasting their first posters on walls in Soho and Tribeca in 1985 they introduced a provocative new type of politicized street art that had an almost immediate effect. Rooted in an era when women were increasingly conscious of widespread inequalities in America, the Guerrilla Girls… -
![Since cameras were banned from courtrooms, news outlets depended on professional sketch artists like Freda Reiter for visuals. When Reiter was assigned the Watergate burglary trial, in 1973, she had no idea that she would be spending the better part of two years in Washington.]()
Watergate Courtroom Sketches by Freda L. Reiter, 1973–75
CollectionsTo 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. -
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Talk is Cheap: A Street Poster Exhibition, 1984
CollectionsIn the 1970s and 80s much of downtown New York lay in decay but amidst the economic squalor a surprising art renaissance emerged along the district’s streets and walls. Most people remember the graffiti from that period but of equal interest was the profusion of street posters. This was the… -
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Andy Warhol Ephemera, Part 2: Posthumous Cards, Posters (after Feb. 22, 1987)
CollectionsThis collection features some of the announcement cards, posters and publications from after the artist’s death on February 22, 1987. Posthumous ephemera have an interesting story to tell. As successful as Warhol was in life, the full range of his creativity and prodigious production only emerged after his death. -
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Cara Perlman: Finger-Paint Portraits, Tin Pan Alley, 1981–82
CollectionsPerlman’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. -
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East Village Eye, 1979–1987
CollectionsLeonard Abrams was just 24 years old when he started the East Village Eye in early 1979. Filling a void left after the closing of the East Village Other seven years before, and riding the wave of a newly revived East Village kick-started by CBGB and the rise of Punk,… -
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40 Top Art Events of the Downtown Era: A Timeline, 1974–1992
CollectionsThe Downtown Era began in the 1970s, when aspiring artists of the baby-boomer generation arrived in New York. Over the next two decades, they would radically change the art world, opening it up to new forms of media, new modes of exhibiting art, and new social perspectives. -
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No Wave and Independent Film
CollectionsThe 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. -
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12 Christmas Gifts From Dianne B, Postcard Set 1983, Peter Hujar
CollectionsA recent visit to the Peter Hujar retrospective “Speed of Life” at the Morgan Library and Museum brought to mind a fashion ephemera item in the Gallery 98 collection. The Twelve Perfect Christmas Gifts from Dianne B. (1983) is a mini-portfolio consisting of a decorated cover and twelve postcards, eight… -
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Anton Perich: Electric Brushstrokes, 1978–1989
CollectionsA childhood tinkerer and an aspiring inventor, Perich achieved success in 1977 by creating a machine that automatically produced a sequence of lines with an airbrush activated by a photocell reacting to the lights and darks of projected images. -
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Anton Perich’s NIGHT Magazine Studio 54, Club Culture and Art, 1978-79
CollectionsNIGHT was the creation of artist and photographer Anton Perich who, inspired by Andy Warhol’s Interview, made the decision to publish his own magazine using his own money. …
