December 6, 2017
Redtape Magazine, 1982-1992
“Redtape” was a DIY magazine that showcased experimental literature and art from the downtown New York scene in the ’70s and ’80s. Gallery 98 acquired four issues and accompanying party invitations.
November 29, 2017
The Loss of a Lower East Side Art Stalwart: Toyo Tsuchiya, 1948–2017
We here at Gallery 98 are sad to share the news of the unexpected death, on Thanksgiving Day, of photographer and artist Toyo Tsuchiya. We have had the pleasure of working with Toyo over the last four months, organizing Gallery 98’s most recent online exhibition, Linus Coraggio, Toyo…
November 8, 2017
Rivington School Sculpture Garden
Gallery 98’s current online exhibition Linus Coraggio, Toyo Tsuchiya, and the Rivington School, 1983–95 resurrects the idiosyncratic junkyard sculpture garden created by artists who called themselves the “Rivington School.” A chaotic collection of metal scraps welded together, reaching 20 feet high at some points, the crammed assemblage was demolished in 1987.
November 1, 2017
Illegal Sculpture Garden, Demolished by Police in 1987, Resurrected in New Online Exhibition
Back in the mid-1980s, when New York’s Lower East Side was still a ruined landscape of abandoned buildings and empty lots, a huge sculpture had a dramatic presence at the intersection of Rivington and Forsyth Street. With points rising up to twenty feet high, the densely packed jungle of welded scrap…
October 25, 2017
Another Joke by Anthony Haden-Guest
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…
October 18, 2017
Vintage Downtown Ephemera on Instagram
Each day, we post an image from our extensive inventory of vintage art and ephemera from downtown New York in the 1970s and ’80s. A source for original posters, flyers, announcements, photographs, and multiples, Gallery 98 covers late-twentieth-century innovations in art, music, film, performance, and other media. All items are…
October 11, 2017
Basquiat Talks
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,…
October 4, 2017
Jeffrey Deitch’s Catalog “Lives,” 1975
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.
September 27, 2017
Choice vs. Animal Rights
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…
September 20, 2017
Chelsea Hotel Ink Drawing by Dee Dee Ramone
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…
September 13, 2017
Colette, “Records of the Story of My Life”
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,…
September 6, 2017
Ending Our National Nightmare: Heroes and Villains of Watergate
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…
August 30, 2017
Carl Andre, O.J. Simpson, Guerrilla Girls
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.
August 22, 2017
“Art Gangster” Unmasked
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…
August 9, 2017
Popular Past Exhibitions
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…
August 2, 2017
Screaming in the Street: AIDS, Art, Activism
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…
July 26, 2017
Popular Newsletters from Gallery 98
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…
July 19, 2017
Back in Stock: the East Village Eye
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…
July 12, 2017
The Art of ABC’s Watergate Coverage, 1974
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).
July 6, 2017
Watergate Courtroom Sketches: New Exhibition at Gallery 98
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…
June 21, 2017
The Survival of ABC No Rio: 1980–Today
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…
June 14, 2017
Inflammatory Portrait of Jenny Holzer by Mike Glier, 1983
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.”…
June 7, 2017
William Pope.L’s Unknown History
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…
May 31, 2017
98 Bowery Now on Instagram
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…
May 24, 2017
Six Art Announcements and Their Stories
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…
May 17, 2017
Basquiat Mania at New York Auction Houses
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…
May 10, 2017
Barry Blinderman, Semaphore Gallery, and the End of the East Village, 1986
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…
May 4, 2017
Newly Uncovered ’80s Ephemera: Hambleton, Haring, Wilke
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.
April 19, 2017
Eighties Artists on Video: Basquiat, Goldin, Serra, Mapplethorpe
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.
April 12, 2017
Alan Vega of Suicide: Video Tribute Screens Friday
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”…
April 5, 2017
P.S. 1 Remembers “New York New Wave”
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…
March 30, 2017
Irreverent Art and Music of the Downtown Era
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…
March 23, 2017
Guerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, Palladium, 1985
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…
March 15, 2017
Fashion Moda: A South Bronx Outpost
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…
March 9, 2017
Basquiat’s Last Exhibition, 1988
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…
February 28, 2017
Rating the 40 Top Art Events of the Downtown Era
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.
February 15, 2017
Unusual Richard Prince Collaboration, 1979
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…
February 9, 2017
Activist Art from the Reagan Era
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,”…
February 2, 2017
Art and Ephemera from the “Downtown Era”
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.
January 25, 2017
“Art for All” brings COLAB to Uniqlo
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…
January 17, 2017
Wojnarowicz’s Pitch-Perfect Political Print
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…
January 12, 2017
Andrew Castrucci and Bullet Space: An Art Squat in the 1980s & ’90s
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.
December 7, 2016
2016 Highlight: The Complete 98 Bowery Story
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…
November 30, 2016
Colab, M. Henry Jones, Adam Purple
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…
November 1, 2016
Robert Mapplethorpe documentary screens this Thursday
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…
October 27, 2016
“The Ramones Way” street naming this Sunday
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.”…
October 20, 2016
Lower East Side portraits, 1981
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…
October 18, 2016
Postscript to a Lower East Side story
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.