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…

Over the weekend, Gallery 98 acquired a large collection of vintage issues of the East Village Eye, including seventeen issues that had previously sold out from our inventory.Notable among the contents are illustrated centerfolds by John Sex and Michael Roman; cover illustrations by Futura 2000 and Richard Hambleton; reporting on the the East Village art scene, the death (while in police custody) of…

In the absence of photographic documentation, ABC Television sent sketch artist Freda Reiter to cover the Watergate trials. Reiter didn’t only document the happenings in the courtroom, but also re-created the scenes of Nixon’s notorious tape-recorded conversations (to accompany ABC’s playback of the covert audiotapes).

The resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in August 1974, and the prison sentences issued to many of his top aides in 1975, were vindications for those who hoped to see deception and criminality purged from the White House. As our current president faces similar allegations, Watergate has returned to…

It’s a bit of a shock, walking by 156 Rivington Street and seeing a completely empty lot where, for more than 35 years, the alternative art space ABC No Rio had stood. No Rio’s quasi-accidental origin story dates back to 1980 and the “Real Estate Show,” illicitly organized by the…

It’s hard to imagine a better depiction of artist Jenny Holzer than this 1983 lithograph by her soon-to-be husband, Mike Glier, a fellow member in the artists’ group COLAB. Glier’s portrait is one in a series called “Calling Women,” intended to emphasize the assertiveness of its female subjects—a follow-up to his series “Crying Men.”…

This week, the art world’s spotlight is on William Pope.L, the latest winner of the Bucksbaum Award, given to one participant in each Whitney Biennial. Pope.L’s contribution, “Claim (Whitney version),” consists of a small room covered inside and out with several thousand slices of rotting baloney, each decorated with a…

Art and music enthusiasts of 1970s and 80s downtown New York should follow @OnlineGallery98 and @98Bowery on Instagram for vintage art, event announcements, and an autobiographical narrative…

The right piece of ephemera can spark an endless conversation about art history and art-world gossip. Gallery 98 has previously shown vintage pieces in the online exhibitions “The Night Time Is the Right Time: NYC Nightclub Ephemera, 1980s” and “40 Top Art…

A request from Sotheby’s recently alerted Gallery 98 to the full slate of Basquiat auctions taking place in New York this week. To promote their star piece, an untitled 1982 canvas estimated at $60 million, the auction house was assembling an oversized newspaper catalogue, using content from Gallery 98 and…

Though ephemera by definition is made without an eye to the future, its collectors treasure ephemera for its ability to call to mind forgotten history. Among a collection of ephemera recently acquired by Gallery 98, a scabrous piece of samizdat by artist Mike Cockrill attacks his former dealer Barry Blinderman…

Gallery 98 has recently acquired a large collection of gallery announcements, publications, and posters connected to New York’s 1980s downtown art scene. The collection comes from artist Franc Palaia, who was present for much of the era’s artistic excitement.

The 1981 video “New York/New Wave,” on continuous loop now through September in P.S. 1’s exhibition “A BIT OF MATTER: The MoMA PS1 Archives, 1976–2000,” serves as a reminder of the early period when art events were first documented on video.

This Friday, April 14, Howl! Happening will pay tribute to the late Alan Vega, with a screening of Paul Tschinkel’s new video documentary Alan Vega: An Artist’s Story. The video includes vintage footage of Suicide, the innovative electro-punk duo Vega formed with Martin Rev; footage of his flickering light-up “junk”…

P.S. 1’s “New York/New Wave” exhibition, organized by Diego Cortez in 1981, is one of the more memorable events treated in the new historical exhibition “A Bit of Matter: The MOMA PS1 Archives, 1976–2000,” which opens this Sunday, April 9, at P.S. 1. Visitors to “A Bit of Matter” will…

Gallery 98 has created a timeline of the “Downtown Era,” drawing from our extensive inventory of gallery invitations and posters. One of the rarer items is the invitation to the “Punk Art” exhibition at the Washington Project for the Arts, opened on May 15, 1978. Organized by Alice Denney with…

Gallery 98 has created a timeline of the “Downtown Era,” drawing from our extensive inventory of gallery invitations and posters. The spirit of the period is evident in this 1985 poster, for an exhibition curated by the Guerrilla Girls at the nightclub Palladium: what proved to be an uneasy meeting…

When Stefan Eins opened the art space Fashion Moda in the South Bronx, in 1978, he hoped that the unlikely setting, one of the country’s most devastated neighborhoods, would stir the creativity of his Downtown peers. One of the first to respond was John Ahearn, who in 1979 turned Fashion…

The most conspicuous painting in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1988 exhibition at Vrej Baghoomian Gallery was “Riding with Death,” a stark depiction of an emaciated figure with a featureless black face, seated atop a few white bones loosely arranged like a horse. At the exhibition’s opening, the dark forebodings of “Riding with…

Gallery 98, a specialized outlet for art and ephemera from 1970s and ’80s downtown New York, has done something special with its new online exhibition, spotlighting announcements and posters from its inventory.

Perhaps the most unusual item currently available at Gallery 98 can only be described as the chance collaboration of “Pictures Generation” superstar Richard Prince and COLAB theorist Alan W. Moore. The story is simple enough: having grabbed a handful of the hand-outs that accompanied Prince’s 1979 window display at Three…

One place to see the activist art of the 1980s is Gallery 98, where online exhibitions have highlighted the agitprop work of artists’ groups like COLAB and Guerrilla Girls. A quick scroll through Gallery 98’s inventory reacquaints us with historic exhibitions like the “Real Estate Show,” “Artists against Nuclear Madness,”…

Marc H. Miller’s website 98 Bowery describes the downtown New York art and music scene as Miller observed it, from a top-floor Bowery loft, in the years 1969–1989. Gallery 98 is the online store for 98 Bowery: a place for students and collectors to find art and ephemera created during this dynamic era.

Gallery 98 is pleased to lend objects to the historical section of “Art for All,” an exhibition of low-priced artists’ multiples organized by Jeffrey Deitch for Uniqlo’s SoHo store. The idea of art for the masses was a central tenet for young artists in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly those affiliated with the artists’ group…

It’s a rare artwork that shows us the persistence of our political ills. Back in 1992, David Wojnarowicz’s silkscreen print “Democracy” appeared in the street poster exhibition and artists’ book Your House Is Mine, now featured in Gallery 98’s new exhibition, “Andrew Castrucci and Bullet Space: An Art Squat in…

Few visual works capture the spirit of the East Village and the Lower East Side in the 1980s like Your House Is Mine, a street poster project begun in 1988 and compiled into an oversize artists’ book in 1992.

We have finished our website 98 Bowery, which documents Marc H Miller’s life through a history of the art and music of downtown Manhattan and the Lower East Side…

Gallery 98 is an online resource for art and ephemera from downtown New York in the 1970s and ’80s. Our weekly e-mails inform collectors and fans about new additions to the inventory, online exhibitions, and relevant news from around the art world. The Gallery 98 newsletter is archived at…

Another great Howl! Happening event: this Thursday, November 3, the gallery will host a free screening of Robert Mapplethorpe, Paul Tschinkel’s rarely seen 2006 documentary. The film features interviews with the photographer’s closest colleagues and family, including his father and his childhood priest. The original footage of Mapplethorpe himself shows…

New York City, and the borough of Queens, continues to honor the Ramones during this 40th-anniversary year. On Sunday, October 30, the corner of 67th Avenue and 110th Street, in front of their alma mater Forest Hills High School, will be christened “The Ramones Way.”…

Gallery 98 is happy to add to its inventory two photo-composites by Tom Warren, compiling images from his early-1980s itinerant “portrait studios.” At a time when artists were feeling cut off from the “real world,” Warren set up public studios in different neighborhoods, where he could provide professional-quality portraits to…

98 Bowery, Marc H. Miller’s personal pictorial scrapbook of Lower East Side bohemia, covers the years 1969 through 1989, when he inhabited the top-floor loft at the title address. Part autobiography and part history, the website captures historic developments in art and music.

In the eight years since Marc H. Miller started the website 98 Bowery, more than half-a-million people have explored its pages. The site charts the art and music scene in downtown New York from 1969 through 1989, as experienced by Miller from the top floor loft at the address of the title.

From the moment the first issue of the East Village Eye hit the streets, in January 1979, this independent paper, published on a shoestring, became the voice of a dynamic new downtown scene. Under the direction of Leonard Abrams, it would have an eight-year run, ultimately totaling 72 issues. During…

It was inevitable that the East Village art scene of the 1980s would make a comeback: it was just too much fun, and too profitable. Not only does Howl! Happening now have an exhibition about the East Village Eye—whose succession of arts editors, including Walter Robinson and Carlo McCormick, charted…

Gallery 98’s extensive new online exhibition resurrects the anomalous Baird Jones: the curator, club party promoter, photographer, author, and celebrity gossip who personified the free-wheeling, polymorphous spirit of fin-de-siècle downtown New York. When Baird died, in 2008, the New York Times ran the headline “Man Departs a Life Lived on…

Gallery 98 recently got hold of a large collection of postcards and flyers from the downtown art and club scene, spanning the late 1970s to early 2000s. Here’s a preview of some of the treasures, before we add them to our Nightclub Ephemera page over the next…

Since its launch, a little over a year ago, Howl! Happening gallery at 6 East 1st Street has consistently celebrated the East Village’s 1970s and ’80s heyday. The gallery’s fall season opens on September 16 with an exhibition devoted to the East Village Eye, the independent publication founded by Leonard…

After sixteen weeks at the Queens Museum, “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go! Ramones and the Birth of Punk” closes this Sunday, July 31. It’s been a memorable run, with crowds exceeding 3,000 on opening day, causing 90-minute lines for the exhibition. The final attendance is not yet in, but it’s certain to…