Real Estate Show, Photo by Ann Messner (1980), Offset Poster made for the exhibition The Real Estate Show Was Then: 1980 at the James Fuentes Gallery, 2014. Size: 18 x 26 inches — Available
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. With a new building now under construction and scheduled to open in 2026, ABC No Rio should be able to survive another 45 years. The question is whether the mix of activists, punks, squatters, anarchists and artists whose works make up ABC No Rio 45 Years, will be able to continue leading the art space after it is housed in a multi-million-dollar building located in a gentrified neighborhood very different from the Hispanic barrio in which it was founded.
The embrace of politics and oppositional culture that made ABC No Rio unique can be traced back to the space’s origin in 1980 when a group of artists illegally broke into a city-owned building and mounted an exhibition about real estate abuses on the Lower East Side. The artists were quickly evicted, but then, surprisingly, were offered the use of a nearby building that was to become ABC No Rio. The arrangement was intended to be temporary, but over the next 45-years the artists resisted the city’s attempts to evict them, and eventually raised enough money, not only to buy the rundown building, but also to replace it with an entirely new structure. Much of the credit for this can be given to Steven Englander (1961 – 2024) who headed ABC No Rio from the 1990s right up to his untimely death last December.
A Short Video Explores How an Illegal Exhibition About Real Estate Led to The Construction of A Multi-Million-Dollar Art Space 45-Years later
The Real Estate Show, (2:43 min) Video by Cole Berry-Miller
ABC No Rio 45 Years Closes Saturday April 26
Emily Harvey Foundation – 537 Broadway, 2nd Floor
Left to right; Photographer Tom Warren, Marc H Miller, and Alan Moore (co-editors of the 1985 book ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Gallery). On the walls (left side) Cara Perlman’s finger-paint portrait of John and Charlie Ahearn; Mike Glier’s Crying Policeman, Joe Lewis’s “Alone,” and (right) Walter Robinson’s “Fight Tyranny in all its Forms.” Photograph by Katherine Jánszky Michaelsen
