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 our favorite newsletters from 2024. It is no surprise that the emphasis is mostly on the downtown art scene.
As the year comes to an end, Gallery 98 extends holiday greetings to all our customers and online visitors. Special thanks go to Amani Marshall, the jack-of-all-trades who keeps everything running, and to Cole Berry-Miller who has been providing us with promotional videos about items in our collection. We also are grateful for the work of Katherine Jánszky Michaelsen whose expert editing keeps our newsletters grammatical and, we hope, entertaining to read.
See all of Gallery 98’s newsletters on our Newsletter Archive page
The Theoretical Girls: Women Artists of The Pictures Generation
The 1988 announcement card (above) 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 was Metro Pictures’ specialty. — Read more.
– Newsletter January 2, 2024
The Blues Aesthetic (1989): Looking Deeper at African American Art
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. For Powell, the exhibition marked an auspicious curatorial debut. His goal was not only to distill what he thought was unique about African American art, but also to show the broad influence it was already having on global modernism. — Read more.
– Newsletter February 9, 2024
Sam Wagstaff, Robert Mapplethorpe, Anne MacDonald: Visit Our New Online Exhibition
Sam Wagstaff and Anne MacDonald, NYC, Early 1970s
Gallery 98 has recently acquired a collection of letters, gallery cards and books from the estate of Anne MacDonald (1942 – 2018), an art patron who founded San Francisco Artspace and the magazine Shift. All of the items connect to Sam Wagstaff, a charismatic collector of photography, and to his partner, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Objects from this collection are now featured in an online exhibition. — Read more.
– Newsletter May 16, 2024
A Book About Colab (And Related Activities)
A Book About Colab (and Related Activities), edited by Max Schuman, Printed Matter, 2015. A second printing is now available through Printed Matter
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 evolved into something more significant: an assembly of artists whose innovative new approaches to the making and exhibiting of art helped to radically alter the traditional ways of the art world in the 1980s. — Read more.
– Newsletter May 30, 2024
Video Coverage of the Memorable 1982 – 1983 Art Season
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 1982-83 season. For this newsletter, we’ve updated the flyer above (a piece of paper ephemera) with actual video clips from the programs advertised. — Read more.
– Newsletter June 6, 2024
The Origins of Gallery 98: Marc H. Miller and 98 Bowery
Marc H Miller with his website 98 Bowery, 1969-89: View From the Top Floor. Gallery 98 was originally this site’s online store before expanding and becoming independent.
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, 1969–89: View from the Top Floor by Marc H Miller. In the 1970s and 80s, Miller was a concept artist, curator and writer closely connected to the downtown music and art scene. — Read more.
– Newsletter June 27, 2024
ABC No Rio Dinero: Ephemera from the Gallery’s First Five Years
In 1985, Gallery 98’s Marc H. Miller collaborated with Alan W. Moore on the book ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery. No one would have imagined that ABC No Rio would survive, but against all odds it has persisted now for close to forty years, and just last month celebrated the groundbreaking for an entirely new building scheduled for completion by early 2026. Featured here are items from ABC No Rio’s first five years, when the gallery was affiliated with the artist group COLAB. — Read more.
– Newsletter September 19 2024
