Back in 1978 M. Henry Jones had legendary status at the School of Visual Arts. His senior project in animation was a Herculean effort that involved printing, cutting, and coloring thousands of photographs to create a 2:22 minute film of The Fleshtones performing Soul City.

Clayton Patterson is an artist who wears many hats. Trained as a printmaker, he first worked in a fine arts print studio after his arrival in New York in 1979. His creative work has included just about every medium: sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, film, fashion, curating, journalism and publishing.

The title, “Why Have There Been No Great Black Art Dealers,” of a recent article by Janelle Zara in the New York Times’ T Magazine was derived from the famous 1971 article by feminist art historian Linda Nochlin. Much like Nochlin, who was able to identify many successful women artists, T Magazine also  succeeded in finding important black art dealers.

Like the best art ephemera, the announcement card for Suzanne Mallouk’s exhibition at the East Village gallery Vox Populi (1985) has both a compelling image and an intriguing background story. Mallouk is best known for her relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat as chronicled in her friend Jennifer Clement’s book Widow Basquiat:  A Love…

There are only a few more days left to see this choice collection of announcement cards, flyers, posters, photographs, etc. usually only available for online viewing at Miller’s website Gallery 98. The Fuentes exhibition features top-tier ephemera selected to provide a capsule review of New York’s dynamic art world from the 1970s to 1990s.

The exhibition Downtown Art Ephemera, 1970s-1990s; Curated by Marc H Miller will run through July 25. Re-live one of the most interesting eras of contemporary art with a choice assortment of announcement cards, flyers, posters, photographs, and other vintage items by artists such as Basquiat, Goldin, Haring, Holzer, Hujar, Koons, Mapplethorpe, Piper, Prince, Schnabel, Smith, Sherman,…

All the downtown New York art stars of that time are represented with top tier art ephemera:  Basquiat, Goldin, Haring, Holzer, Hujar, Koons, Mapplethorpe, Piper, Prince, Schnabel, Smith, Sherman, Warhol, Wojnarowicz etc.

Gallery 98 specializes in art ephemera from the 1970’s – 1990’s.  The vintage announcements, posters, and flyers available for purchase online make for an affordable and practical way for art lovers to indulge their collecting passions.  Here are three new additions to our inventory.

Sifting through a collection of art ephemera is a bit like prospecting. Most of the time, the things that you find are of little or no interest, but every once in a while you strike intellectual gold.  That’s how we felt when we uncovered two items distributed by the pioneering…

When artist and curator Marc H. Miller started Gallery 98 five years ago, his goal was to help promote the downtown artists from COLAB who were part of his peer group in the 1970’s and 80’s. The announcement cards, flyers, photographs, and low-price multiples that were posted captured the visual feel…

The end of the century was a golden age for print ephemera. Art galleries in particular valued quality graphics.  Featuring carefully selected type and imagery, many of the announcements sent out by galleries were designed by the exhibiting artists themselves. Looking at this ephemera, today, provides a capsule history of the…

Complaining about the high price of art and your lack of wall space? As printed invites give way to the digital era, old announcement cards and flyers exist as an important record of the past. Vintage ephemera connected to your favorite artists and art movements is the practical way to stay involved…

The passing of Bettie Ringma last week had special resonance here at Gallery 98.  From 1975 to 1982, Ringma was both the partner and a creative collaborator of Marc H Miller, Gallery 98’s founder. Their collaborative work from 40 years ago has continued to connect them, especially in recent years as it has enjoyed renewed attention.

Gallery 98 is pleased to have lent works by Charlie Ahearn, John Ahearn, Jane Dickson, Stefan Eins, Bobby G., Jenny Holzer, Christof Kohlhofer, Dick Miller, Tom Otterness, and Christy Rupp to the exhibition Brand New: Art & Commodity in the 1980’s, which opens at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. on February 14th.

The exhibition of the Polaroid photographs taken by Bettie Ringma and Marc Miller in the bars of Amsterdam in 1979-1980 got plenty of attention when it opened at the Stigter Van Doesburg Gallery this past week. Here are some excerpts from English language press and a video of the opening ceremonies.

In 1979 artists Bettie Ringma and Marc H. Miller moved from New York City to Amsterdam, and needed a way to support themselves. Remembering a photographer they’d seen selling Polaroid portraits at Coney Island, Miller and Ringma decided to try the same in Amsterdam’s bars and cafés. Over the next…

Of the many galleries and art spaces that opened in the 1980s East Village, none was as visually conspicuous as the converted, open-air “Gas Station” at the corner of Avenue B and East Second Street. After curator Ruben Garcia secured the lease to the lot, a group of metal sculptors had…

“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.

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…