In the 1980s culture-loving New Yorkers not only attended gallery openings, theater events and movies, but also participated in New York’s flourishing nightclub scene. While music and dancing were the main attraction, clubs also hosted art exhibitions, performances, fashion, film and video. During these years, almost every gallery opening, film…

There are many reasons to be interested in art ephemera — a type of collectible that has the advantage of being small, easy to store, and modestly priced. Many collectors follow specific artists, while others like to accumulate vintage material connected to a particular art movement or art theme. To help visitors…

In the 1970s and 80s, Miller was an artist, curator and writer closely involved with the downtown music and art scene. His autobiographical site 98 Bowery, named after the building he lived in for twenty years, provides a first-person perspective of a dynamic era when the East Village and the Lower East Side…

In the mid-1970s, Amos Poe was one of the shining lights of the downtown art scene.  Inspired by the new bands at CBGB, and the improvisational techniques of French New Wave cinema, Poe showed that you did not need a large budget — or any budget at all — to create…

It’s not often that original vintage copies of a rare and historic gallery announcement card suddenly appear. But this is exactly what happened with a highly prized 1982 card printed by the Annina Nosei Gallery to promote Jean-Michel Basquiat’s print portfolio Anatomy.

Gallery 98 is a site for collectors, 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 spotlights items in our inventory that connects to current events and new additions. Here are six of…

Postcards from Blade sent to his lifelong friend Ronnie Glazer, who he first met growing up at the Parkside Houses in the Bronx. A few years back, Gallery 98 was fortunate to have acquired a large collection of ephemera connected to the pioneer graffiti artist Blade (Steven Ogburn), who…

There is no shortage of treasures buried in Gallery 98’s extensive inventory of close to 8,000 items.  Each one of these four items captures a different moment and direction in art. All have stories to tell. Richard Lippold, Sculpture for Four Seasons Restaurant, Signed Card, 1961 Top: Richard Lippold,…

The short documentary film that can be viewed below, provides a brief account of Watergate, and the history of courtroom illustration. The film’s highlight. however, is a newly discovered interview with Freda Reiter from the time she was making these drawings. The surprise here is how sympathetic Reiter was towards…

We are sending this newsletter out a day early to inform readers about the memorial for Resnick scheduled Wednesday at 6:00pm in the Great Hall at Cooper Union, 41 Cooper Square, NYC. There is also an exhibition of Resnick’s photographs in the Cooper Union Library. Below is the tribute we wrote about Marcia…

From our newsletter archives. First published February 6, 2025. Revised. Exterior view of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s new building. Courtesy Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo: © Dror Baldinger FAIA This week’s reopening of the Studio Museum in Harlem in a spectacular new building designed…

The stuffed press kit for the Museum of Modern Art‘s 1984 blockbuster exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art proudly boasted that the exhibition was the first to “juxtapose modern and tribal objects in the light of informed art history.”…

What is included in this Gallery 98 newsletter may well be all that survives of Insure the Life of An Ant, an innovative work of conceptual art by J. Michael Malloy. Shown originally at OK Harris Gallery in April 1972, this provocative example of participatory art was inspired by the…

Items of art ephemera, such as announcement cards, posters, press releases, gallery catalogues, low-price multiples, and other art-related items designed primarily for short term use, can tell fascinating stories.  This Gallery 98 newsletter features six items that were selected simply because we find them interesting.  What you see here is just the tip…

From our newsletter archives — Originally published July 15, 2021. Two new items added. Cynthia Sley and Uli Rimkus Behind the Bar at Tin Pan Alley c. 1981, Photograph by Keri Pickett. Courtesy Pickett Pictures LLC Best known now as the inspiration for the fictional bar Hi Hat…

This Gallery 98 newsletter spotlights two artists, M. Henry Jones (1957 – 2022) and Roger Lannes de Montebello (1908 – 1986), caught on the far side of this digital divide. In the case of both artists, their creative ambitions exceeded the capabilities of the analog technology that was available to…

Gallery 98 can now offer over 50 of the Eye’s original 72 issues. Gallery 98 has recently acquired a large collection of the East Village Eye, the much-coveted independent DIY newspaper founded in 1979 by the late Leonard Abrams (1954 – 2023). During the 1980s, when the East Village was the…

Back in 1982, Mary Boone was celebrated on the cover New York Magazine as the “New Queen of The Art Scene.” But in 2019 her career abruptly ended when she was forced to close her gallery, and serve six months in prison for tax fraud.  Now Boone has returned, serving as the celebrity co-curator (along…

Wigstock (Woodstock with a drag twist) began in 1984, when Lady Bunny and others from the Pyramid nightclub, spontaneously decided to put on a show in Tompkins Square Park. From that point on, Bunny took control and developed Wigstock into an annual downtown event that continued for over twenty years until 2005 with only…

Richard Hambleton New York, an exhibition, organized in 2009 by Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld (whose mother was editor of French Vogue), and Andy Valmorbida in collaboration with Giorgio Armani, heralded a major career comeback. Hambleton was embraced by upscale fashionistas as his retrospective traveled for two years to elegant venues in New…

Left to right: Blade, a subway art pioneer; Tovey Halleck at the Rivington School Sculpture Garden made out of junk; Ann Messner with bolt cutters used to break into an unoccupied city owned building used to mount the Real Estate Show…

In the 1970s Martha Cooper was photographing children on the Lower East Side for the New York Post when she first discovered graffiti:  “You would see a bunch of legible but unintelligible letters on the wall…I found out it was kids’ names.” That revelation began a 50-year obsession for Cooper who started meeting…

From 1997 – 2002, Hoppe enjoyed an ideal situation painting views of the Hamptons, one of New York’s most scenic and affluent summer retreats. These photos, the basis for the paintings, not only capture the beauty of the Hamptons, they also reveal the artist’s fascinating working process.

When local Los Angeles artist Edward Kienholz debuted Back Seat Dodge at the Dwan Gallery in 1964, the life-size sculpture with two mannequins simulating sex in the back seat of a car inspired both chuckles and praise.

In the 1970s and 80s, Hungarian-born Edit DeAk (née Deák) was an influential artworld participant widely respected as a writer, curator and friend to artists. Her beginnings were in Art-Rite, a low budget magazine that she co-founded and co-edited with Walter Robinson from 1973 through 1978.

From our newsletter archives — Originally published September 2, 2021; new images and text added. Portraits of Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and Richard Prince from their respective issues of Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin. 1992-1996. Selected issues from the 1990s of the German Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) magazine are today collector items because of the…

This week’s newsletter is about an episode of art patronage when tens of millions of dollars were spent to support and preserve works of art that did not conform to conventional categories of collecting.  The story begins in 1973, when the German gallerist Heiner Friedrich moves to New York, then travels to…

We usually devote our weekly newsletter to items available for purchase. This week we’re doing the opposite: the items listed below are not available since they have all recently sold. As Gallery 98 has listings for over 8,000 items, many linger on our site for months, and even years. Collectors…

There are so many historically interesting items among the 8,500 examples of art ephemera posted on Gallery 98 that it is sometimes difficult to decide what to feature in our weekly newsletter. This assortment of favorites was chosen to appeal to a broad range of tastes and interests. Each of these items tells…

In the mid-1970s, British artist James Collins explored the concept of the male gaze in a series of exhibitions featuring large-format photos of himself staring at women.

Her participation in punk at its most extreme, upended her career in the 1990s, but over the last decade, she successfully reclaimed her place as one of the key artist-photographers of the 1970s and 80s. Her book Punks, Poets & Provocateurs (2015) established her as one of the best portrait…

The counterculture that emerged in the United States in the 1960s had a strong impact not only on popular culture, but also on different branches of the fine arts. Thomas Crow’s new book The Artist in the Counterculture explores how these different currents interconnected in California from the 1960’s to…

In many ways Blade (Steven Ogburn) is the quintessential artist to come out of the early years of subway graffiti. In the 1970s when graffiti was still a game for city kids to compete against each other to see who would become the most famous, Blade was the self-proclaimed “King…

The film industry has the Oscar, Broadway has the Tony, so why can’t avant-garde performance artists also receive awards? That was the reasoning behind “The ARTIES,” an award ceremony/fundraiser initiated by the downtown alternative space, Franklin Furnace on its 10th Anniversary in 1986.

Francesco Clemente was one of the leaders in the return to figurative painting in the 1980s which is variously grouped under the labels “Neo-Expressionism,” “New Imagery” and the “Transavantgarde.”…

Widely promoted and exhibited in the 1970s and 80s, P&D has been generally ignored since then. This may be because the beauty and decorative qualities of P&D concealed its most radical elements — the movement’s political roots in feminism, and its willingness to embrace multicultural influences.

A press release from Christie’s auction house spotlights Marlene Dumas’ 1997 painting Miss January, and predicts that with an estimate of $12 – $18 million it will become the most expensive work by a living female artist when sold on Wednesday May 14th.

We know the hyper-realist painter Curt Hoppe from his Downtown Portraits series. This newsletter focuses on an earlier phase of Hoppe’s career, the five years from 1997 to 2002 when his subject was the Hamptons.

Art ephemera is primarily a by-product of advertising and promotion. At Gallery 98 our main focus is on exhibition announcement cards and gallery posters, but we also have an interest in the advertisements that galleries place in art magazines. For galleries wanting to advertise, Artforum, with its large international circulation,…

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.

When the artist group Colab was founded in 1977 it was conceived more as a mutual aid society than as an art movement. Its premise was simple: create a legal non-profit so that artists can get access to government grants to finance group projects. Colab membership was open to any artist…

The retrospective exhibition ABC No Rio 45 Years at the Emily Harvey Foundation (537 Broadway, 2nd Floor) includes No Rio’s entire history with sections on the Colab period. No Rio has been run since the late-1990s by a collective of punks, anarchists, squatters and artists, and is now known internationally…

In the course of fourteen years in New York’s Soho arts’ district, Deitch Projects completely reconfigured people’s expectations about art. Its founder Jeffrey Deitch was already a well-known art advisor, curator and critic when in 1996 he decided to open his own gallery, where he remained committed to the populist and…

Gallery 98 keeps adding new items to our inventory. Recently, we have been fortunate to acquire a collection of quality posters, some signed by the artists who created them. What makes for a top-tier poster? In addition to looking good when hanging on a wall, a poster should also have something interesting…

Christo, first alone, and then in collaboration with his wife Jeanne-Claude, was a singular artist who achieved extraordinary worldwide success. Like other artists in the 1960s connected with the European art movement Nouveau Réalisme, Christo moved away from painting in favor of working with found objects.

 It was an art world where originality was prized, and just about anything, in any media, could be considered art.  Carson soon established himself as one of the scene’s most extreme artists, a creator of unusual works and performances that even now, fifty years later, stand out for their originality.

Art writer Edit deAk was a regular at the Mudd Club, and Dubbed in Glamour, a three-night “extravaganza” of performances, music, film and slide shows, was her attempt to bring the creativity of the nightlife scene into a more mainstream art setting.

There is more to the story of 105 Hudson, however, than its role in the gentrification of TriBeCa. For a brief period in the mid-70s it was the key venue where one could experience the radical changes that influenced the development of art in the late 1970s and 80s. Three…