Today Gallery 98 promotes all kinds of art ephemera from the US and Europe, but its original focus was on the alternative art scene that emerged in the East Village and the Lower East Side in the 1970s and 80s. The Italian magazine Kaleidoscope, just now published a lavishly illustrated article using Gallery 98 and its ephemera collection to spotlight this dynamic era of New York art and culture. An informed text by Kenta Murakami provides history and context.
Downtown Archive, Kaleidoscope, Fall/Winter 2021/2022
From Kenta Murakami’s text:
“In 1969, the artist, art historian, later curator, and now art ephemera dealer Marc H.Miller moved into a loft located at 98 Bowery in New York. Miller was part of the first large influx of self-exiled suburbanites moving into the often recently converted flophouses-turned-lofts south of East Houston… On his personal website, 98 Bowery, titled after the address at which he lived until 1989, Miller documents his life moving amongst the various art and music circles that came to populate this neighborhood over the course of the ’70s and ’80s in what is now one of New York City’s richest and most mythologized cultural epochs.”
“Since 2009 Miller has operated a companion website to his personal history called Gallery 98, which sells and documents exhibition fliers, posters, performance documentation, catalogs, magazines, artworks, and other hard to categorize things from this period, sourced originally from several dozen boxes he rediscovered in his basement…”