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…

While it was necessary to make many prints in order to generate the money needed to realize projects, Christo (1935 – 2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935 – 2009) stipulated that no additional editions be made after their deaths. The signed prints and lithographs that are available for sale here come from…

 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…

Created over a two-year period in an abandoned lot on the Lower East Side, the Rivington School Sculpture Garden was a chaotic collection of metal scraps welded together and reaching up to 20 feet high. It was the work of multiple artists, but to call it a collaboration is too…

The sudden passing of Walter Robinson last weekend caused quite a stir on social media. More than just a successful artist and art writer, the engaging and long active Robinson was a point of connection for several generations of downtown artists. He literally knew everyone. …

Although there were earlier museums devoted to African American culture, the creation of the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1968 had special significance. In part this was due to its Harlem location, but it was also on account of its emphasis on art rather than history.

While words appear in the work of Cubist, Surrealist and other early 20th century artists, it wasn’t until the latter half of the century with the rise of Pop and Conceptual art, that words and text became a common motif of art. For those interested in this kind of work,…

If you want to own just one item of art ephemera, a good choice might be a gallery invitation featuring a portrait of your favorite artist. This type of card has long been used as a way to advertise exhibitions, especially if the artist is well-known or has a distinctive…

Gallery goers entered a space similar to a voting booth where they encountered a metal box containing a live ant. Their dilemma:  Should they push a button and kill the ant, or should they allow the ant to live?…

While uptown galleries in wealthy neighborhoods could be intimidating to some, the SoHo galleries with their clean, open spaces seemed welcoming. The appreciation of art, an activity previously reserved for the enjoyment of the elite, now became a popular pastime enjoyed by large, diverse audiences.

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. Given all of this activity, it is no…

As we move into 2025, Gallery 98 intends to keep things moving by incorporating new formats in our social media efforts. Earlier this year we introduced short videos for use on TikTok, and as Instagram reels. Given Gallery 98’s ambition to present the history of art and culture in the 1970s and…

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…

You’ll find some of our “$50 Holiday Suggestions” below. Go to our Ephemera Page to see the full collection.

Bettie Ringma and Marc H Miller Selling Polaroids in the Bars of Amsterdam, 1980. Bilingual (English and Dutch). Hardcover. 216 pages. Published by Lecturis (NL). 2023. All books ordered before Christmas will be signed by Miller with a memorial inscription for Ringma, who died in 2018.

The exhibition “Above Ground: The Martin Wong Graffiti Collection” at the Museum of the City of New York has reminded us of the large quantities of top-tier graffiti-related ephemera that have passed through Gallery 98 over the years.

The holiday season is a time to reach out to friends.  Most people are content to send greeting cards created by companies like Hallmark, but artist Kiki Smith has for many years reconnected with friends by sending photographs of her own art. Gallery 98 has recently obtained ten of these…

Fast, the group exhibition at the Alexander Milliken Gallery, from June 11 to July 15, 1982, is now remembered primarily for its inclusion of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s skull painting (Untitled 1982), which later fetched $110,497,500 at a 2017 auction at Sotheby’s and remains the most expensive of all of Basquiat’s works.

People have many reasons to be interested in art ephemera — a type of collectible that also has the advantage of being small, easy to store, and modestly priced. Many collectors follow specific artists, but others just appreciate catchy images that they can casually display on a bookcase or coffee…

For researchers and scholars, Gallery 98 provides free and easy access to hard-to-find, primary documents like gallery announcement cards, posters, catalogues and magazine advertisements.  Collectors of art ephemera will be pleased with the breadth and richness of Gallery 98’s holdings, and the many ways you can search for items.

When the artist group Colab was founded in 1978 it was conceived more as a mutual aid society than as an art movement. Colab can be credited with helping to re-direct artworld priorities towards themes of inclusion and social engagement.  Because many women artists were part of Colab, feminist ideas were…

“A More Stores” (as the COLAB stores were called) became yearly events with sympathetic galleries providing artists with the necessary retail space.  In 1982, the idea went global when COLAB members Stefan Eins and Jenny Holzer set up a Fashion Moda Store at Documenta 7, the international art fair in Germany.  Keith Haring took the idea a…

In addition to making the subway chalk drawings that quickly won him fame, Haring also promoted his artistic vision by handing out xeroxes, buttons, posters and stickers featuring his ever-expanding repertoire of images.

At one point, Gallery 98 had a near complete collection of the East Village Eye. Many of the most popular of these issues are now back in stock. Gallery 98 has recently been able to re-stock some of the rarest and most sought-after issues of the East Village Eye, an independent, D.I.Y.

Gallery 98 spotlights four 1980s galleries with exceptional exhibition records. Of the four, 303 Gallery, which recently celebrated its 35th anniversary, is the only one to have survived the decade. The history of these groundbreaking galleries can be tracked through the art ephemera they produced for each of their exhibitions.

Gallery 98 has always been particularly strong in 1970’s and 80’s art ephemera from downtown NYC.  Featured below are items from ABC No Rio’s first five years. This was the time when the gallery was affiliated with the artist group COLAB, and was central to an evolving art world that put a premium on art connected to social and…

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 1980s. The portable video camera was still a novelty and artists were eager to see how they and their art looked on television.  A new generation of…

With the beginning this week of the 2024-2025 art season, one topic sure to be of interest is the connection between art, science and technology. We have here spontaneously selected items from our inventory that show some of the various ways in which art and technology have intermixed. We have…

The items that have been selected for this week’s newsletter all fit into that category: each one highlights a still relevant thought-provoking subject related to art, art world politics, and life.

Rarely screened today, The Foreigner lives on primarily through the excellent on-set photographs taken by Fernando Natalici to publicize the film. Gallery 98 has a number of vintage resin-coated prints made from the original negatives by Natalici in the early 1990s when The Foreigner was first released as a VHS video. All prints are signed and annotated by Natalici.

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…

Hoppe will be at Howl! Happening this Sunday, August 11, at 3 PM, to sign copies of the catalog for Downtown Portraits. Copies of the 100-page catalogue with essays by Marc H Miller, Carlo McCormick, and Walter Robinson, are also available for purchase through the Howl online store.

The groundbreaking at the site of the proposed new ABC No Rio arts center. From the article “How the Anarchists at ABC No Rio Got the City to Build Them an Arts Center on the Lower East Side.” From the online publication Hell Gate (owned and…

Daniel J Martinez, “I Can’t Ever Imagine Wanting To Be White”, Metal Button, Whitney Biennial, 1993. Most of the buttons distributed at the Whitney Museum included only fragments of Martinez’s message. This is one of the rare examples that included the complete phrase. The writing…

These days it’s hard to think about anything besides politics. Here are some items from Gallery 98’s inventory that illustrate the ways in which art ephemera and politics have been linked in the past. Back in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan was the art world’s bête noir, and many of…

Five years after they were first publicly exhibited, Curt Hoppe’s Downtown Portraits (all painted between 2010 and 2019) feel very different from how they felt before. While this collection of 25 larger-than-life, acrylic on canvas portraits will continue to be perceived by most viewers as a celebration of downtown culture in the 1970s,…

We were sorry to hear last week about the passing of Audrey Flack (1931-2024), one of the pioneers of photorealist painting.

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,…

You’ll find here uncommon rare items from our inventory of vintage art publications. In the 1960s one of the favorite hangouts for NYC artists was the bar and restaurant Max’s Kansas City where owner Mickey Ruskin was famous for trading credit for art. A list of items sold at auction in…

What makes for a collectible gallery announcement card? The key quality is a powerful iconic image by a well-known artist that evokes the concerns of the particular time the exhibition took place. Lyle Ashton Harris’ 1997 invitation card clearly fits the bill with its compelling picture of two sexually ambiguous black youths from his White Face Series. It perfectly…

ART/new york: A Video Magazine on Art, The 1982 – 1983 Art Season, Keith Haring, Nam June Paik, Brice Marden, Lee Krasner, Julian Schnabel, Robert Rauschenberg, 1983. Folded card. Size: 10.5 x 12.25 inches This promotional mailer for Paul Tschinkel’s Art/new york, A…

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…

At the heart of Gallery 98’s online exhibition of letters and ephemera from the estate of art patron Anne MacDonald (1942 – 2018), is the legendary figure Sam Wagstaff, an early mentor of MacDonald, who later became famous as a collector of photography, and as the lover and supporter of…

Gallery 98 has acquired a collection of letters, gallery cards and books from the estate of Anne MacDonald. All of the items connect to Sam Wagstaff, a collector of photography, and to his partner, Robert Mapplethorpe. Objects from this collection (along with a few from our inventory) are now featured in the…

It appears that the art of courtroom illustration may have declined since its high point in the early 1970s when the Watergate trials were must-see television, and cameras were universally prohibited in America’s courthouses.

Anne MacDonald was an enthusiastic promoter of experimental artists advancing new forms of art-making and innovative ways to expand art audiences. This newsletter focuses on her magazine Shift, that published 15 issues from 1987 to 1993. …