Vintage Downtown Ephemera on Instagram

In the hip circles of downtown New York, we know the phenomenon well: a friend or club acquaintance suddenly gets a big break and then, well, just disappears. Gallery 98 got this cartoon by celebrity journalist Anthony Haden-Guest in the best possible way: an auction of art by celebrities from…

Amidst the flurry of press surrounding the Basquiat exhibition in England are interviews in Dazed and Flashbak with Gallery 98’s Marc H. Miller, about the interview he conducted with Basquiat in 1982 for Paul Tschinkel’s video series ART/new york. While many photographs of Basquiat exist, as well as film footage of the artist at work,…

Jeffrey Deitch’s prominence as an advocate for new and edgy art can be traced back to his very first curatorial venture, at age 23. The 1975 exhibition “Lives,” at the Fine Arts Building (NYC), captured a moment of art-world change when conceptual art was evolving away from didacticism and beginning to embrace real-life issues.

The current controversy over the Guggenheim Museum’s decision to remove three provocative works involving animals from the exhibition “Art and China after 1989” brings back memories of an early conceptual-art piece featured on the 98 Bowery website. Entitled “Insure the Life of an Ant,” the work by Michael Malloy was shown…

Few places have as much bohemian cachet as the old Chelsea Hotel. Though visitors can still find plaques honoring former residents like Virgil Thomson, Thomas Wolfe, and Dylan Thomas, the building has lost its famously shabby character amid an endless renovation begun in 2011. The old Chelsea may be dead, but its spirit lives…

The pioneering performance and multimedia artist Colette, who has lived in Berlin for the past two years, is back in New York for a short stay. The circumstances of her visit are all too familiar to New York artists: as real-estate prices keep rising, storage spaces get sold for redevelopment,…

From the 1973 break-in at the Watergate complex, through President Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1978, to the 1975 convictions of top White House staff, the prolonged demise of the Nixon administration was an unprecedented media event. Courtroom artist Freda Reiter covered multiple cases for ABC TV, leaving an impressive artistic…

Almost immediately after their 1985 debut, the Guerrilla Girls’ street posters made a strong impression. Initially focused around the lack of representation of women in galleries, by the 1990s Guerrilla Girls posters pointed out other political issues of concern for women. Today, they are admired both for their politics and art.

For several years, Gallery 98 has been puzzled by a piece of mail art in our inventory, originally sent to the offices of Artforum in 1974. The piece consists of the front page of the Los Angeles Times of February 28, 1974, with a lead story on artist (and later gallerist) Tony Shafrazi’s vandalism of Pablo…

As Gallery 98 continues to mount new online exhibitions, its exhibition history is maintained online. Right now, there are fifteen entries in the website’s “exhibition archive.” Here are some past exhibitions worth checking out. Tom Otterness, The Zodiac Love Series, 1982–87Gallery 98’s first online exhibition brought together…

Gallery 98 is pleased to have provided works for the exhibition “Screaming in the Streets: AIDS, Art, Activism,” opening this Thursday, August 3, at ClampArt gallery, 247 West 29th Street. The exhibition takes its name from a statement by artist David Wojnarowicz at the height of the AIDS Crisis: “I worry that…

Gallery 98 has been sending out this weekly e-mail newsletter since 2013. The mailings are archived online at https://gallery98.org/news, going back to July 2015. Here are some highlights from the last year. A spotlight on Mike Glier’s compelling 1982 portrait of Jenny Holzer, part of his…