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…

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.