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…

Did you miss the Queens Museum’s special programming for Hey! Ho! Let’s Go! Ramones and the Birth of Punk earlier this month? No need to fret: thanks to Joly MacFie’s indispensable online video series Punkcast, these enlightening and entertaining events are now available on YouTube.

This Saturday, June 25, in conjunction with the exhibition Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk, the Queens Museum gets taken over by hordes of punks and hipsters for a full day of Ramones events. …

This coming Sunday, June 19, two discussions at the Queens Museum will explore the relationship between the Ramones and visual art, in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibition Hey! Ho! Let’s Go! Ramones and the Birth of Punk.

When Marc H. Miller was hired as a curator in 1985, the Queens Museum was a much smaller place, sharing its building (a former World’s Fair pavilion in Flushing Meadows Park) with an ice-skating rink. Miller’s first exhibitions drew from the thriving downtown art scene he knew as a longtime…

Yesterday’s rainfall did little to dampen the spirits of the many Ramones fans and local residents who turned out for the unveiling of a new mural at the “Thorneycroft Ramp” in Forest Hills, Queens. The unveiling concluded a day of events organized by the Queens Museum, which also included a…

Next week, on Sunday, June 5, the Queens Museum presents a day of events to accompany the exhibition “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go! Ramones and the Birth of Punk.” The day begins at 2 p.m. at the museum, with an exhibition tour by co-curator Marc H. Miller (founder of Gallery 98).

Gallery 98 has recently re-stocked some of the most coveted issues of the East Village Eye. A major stand-out is the “Chilly Xmas” issue of January 1982, with its prime early coverage of hip hop culture. Futura 2000 designed the centerfold; Lee Quiñones also contributed art.

“Hey! Ho! Let’s Go! Ramones and the Birth of Punk” opened to enthusiastic crowds Sunday, April 10th at the Queens Museum. Upwards of 3,500 people attended, breaking the museum’s record and creating 90-minute waits to get into the exhibition.

In the 1980s, the A. More Stores were one of the signature activities of the artists group COLAB: artist-run pop-up shops selling low-priced artworks and multiples by group members and friends. Over the years, Gallery 98 has been a principal promoter of COLAB, through online exhibitions like “Collecting COLAB.” Our…

After many years of preparation, “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go! Ramones and the Birth of Punk“ will be opening this Sunday, April 10th at the Queens Museum. This multi-media exhibition not only tells the story of the Ramones, but also puts special emphasis on the explosion of visual art that surrounded…

A three-year project nears completion, as the Queens Museum prepares to open “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk,” curated by Gallery 98’s Marc H. Miller. The opening, on Sunday, April 10, is now only ten days away.

Arturo Vega (1947–2013) had an unusual career. Arriving in New York in 1971, Vega was attracted as much to the excitement of music as to the isolated life of a gallery artist. Luck was with him. Just as the East Village music scene was beginning, Arturo met Dee Dee Ramone,…

Gallery 98 will be celebrating and participating at the launch party for Neke Carson’s newly released book, Works on Art and Rectal Realism. The celebration is hosted by Anthony Haden-Guest and Lorraine Leckie, and takes place this Saturday (March 12) from 5 to 7 PM at Printed Matter’s new store, 231…

Those with long memories can recall Printed Matter’s October 2011 exhibition “A Show about Colab (and Related Activities).” The exhibition revealed how the loosely organized artists group Collaborative Projects, Inc. (or “COLAB”) changed the art world’s priorities through a series of exhibitions, new alternative spaces, and other do-it-yourself projects between…

In the 1970s, conceptual art and performance art both relied on photography as a means to express or document the ideas and events that constituted the works’ content. In most cases, the photographs were largely an afterthought, a means to an end. Generally small and done in black & white, these…

Marc H. Miller of 98 Bowery and Gallery 98 has co-curated the upcoming exhibition Hey! Ho! Lets Go: The Ramones and the Birth of Punk, announced last week in the New York Times. The exhibition commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Ramones’ first album (Ramones), with an opening April 10…

Along with M. Henry Jones and Colette, Neke Carson is the third artist in Anthony Haden-Guest’s important article “Innovative provocations: meet the new art-world rebels.” As a pioneering performance artist in the 1970s, Carson epitomized Haden-Guest’s description of someone “making work that was of its nature hard to buy and…

M. Henry Jones is another Gallery 98 favorite featured in Anthony Haden-Guest’s excellent article “Innovative provocations: Meet the new art-world rebels.” The article touts three artists—Colette, Neke Carson and Jones—who since the 1970s have stubbornly pursued their own creative interests apart from the “mainstream” art establishment.

In an eloquent article on the “New Art-World Rebels,” Anthony Haden-Guest describes three 1970s provocateurs—Colette, Neke Carson, and M. Henry Jones—all of whom have previously had online exhibitions at Gallery 98. Haden-Guest sets these artists against the background of the current art boom, and heralds the return of “interesting art” by artists…

Forty years after the first issue of Punk, an exhibition honoring the influential magazine opens tonight at Howl! Happening, 6 East 1st Street. Founded by John Holmstrom, Legs McNeil and Ged Dunn, Punk became the model for a subsequent wave of do-it-yourself fanzines.

In the last few weeks, much attention has settled on the artist Adam Purple, the widely credited inspiration of the urban garden movement and a hero in the battle against the gentrification of the Lower East Side. Purple’s best-known work, the 15,000-square-foot Garden of Eden, grew from its first planting in…

Looking backward is nothing new for the website 98 Bowery and its commercial offshoot Gallery 98. These sites aim to keep alive the radical fringes of the downtown New York art scene of the 1970s and ’80s by recounting tales and selling art and ephemera.

If the number of inquiries that Gallery 98 receives from graduate students is any indication, there is much curiosity about the way artists in the 1970s and ’80s sought to democratize the distribution of art. A leader in this effort was the artist group Collaborative Projects, Inc. (COLAB), which sponsored…

Gallery 98 features some of Walter’s earliest works, from the years he was a central part of the artist group Collaborative Projects, Inc. (COLAB). “Man with Broken Bottle” and “Woman with Cocktail” both date from 1980, and were featured at the first A. More Store, a pop-up outlet for artist…

Fueling downtown New York’s creativity in the late 1970s and ’80s was the do-it-yourself spirit that infused all the arts. Everyone was starting a band, a night club, a newspaper, or a gallery. This was the context in December 1980, when the artists’ group Collaborative Projects, Inc. (COLAB) organized the…

A one-of-a-kind collection of Polaroid portraits, taken in the bars and cafes of Amsterdam by Bettie Ringma and Marc H. Miller, has long been featured on 98Bowery.com. This week, the photographs have received much wider exposure, on media conglomerate Vice’s European websites.

David Owen, the co-founder of London vintage booksellers IDEA Books Ltd, has chosen Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma’s “Bettie Visits CBGB” as what he calls a “Superbook”: a rare work of exceptional cultural significance. Owen makes his point in an entertaining and evocative radio program just released by Radio Wolfgang.

While the early graffiti writers paved the way for the ambitious top-to-bottom subway art that would later spread throughout the world, Colette’s illegal art found a lineage in the unbroken stream of art students who would reject galleries in favor of the urban canvas and its wide audience.

Among the works that Gallery 98 has lent to the exhibition “The Downtown Decade: NYC 1975-1985” at Glenn Horowitz RARE (17 W. 54th Street, NYC) is Christof Kohlhofer’s Susan B. Anthony shopping bag, originally made in 1981 for the second A More Store…

The creative spirit of the Lower East Side in the 1980s is encapsulated in the phrase “The Island of Negative Utopia,” the title of an exhibition about ABC No Rio (a still operating LES art space) held at the Kitchen in Soho in 1984.

Baird Jones’s scrawled-upon and rubber-stamped photograph of artist Mark Kostabi at a “Kosthappening” is an unusual relic of the glory days of the East Village in the mid-1980s. Gallery 98 has lent this standout image to the exhibition “The Downtown Decade: NYC 1975-1985,” open for viewing through October 10th at…

Gallery 98 is pleased to be participating in the exhibition “The Downtown Decade: NYC 1975-1985” at Glenn Horowitz’s New York exhibition space RARE. The gallery describes the show as “a multi-genre overview of the intensely fertile and interconnected creative scene that developed on New York City’s Lower East Side during…

Not much remains of J. Michael Malloy’s pioneering interactive art work “Insure the Life of an Ant,” shown at OK Harris Gallery in 1972. Today few people have even heard of Malloy, who abruptly stopped making art soon after this controversial exhibit closed.

Gallery 98 continues its online exhibition of portraits by Cara Perlman, created at the legendary Times Square nightclub Tin Pan Alley in 1981 and 1982. Done directly from life, these unconventional, finger-paint portraits capture likenesses with a striking immediacy. You can judge the success of these depictions in the Polaroids below, showing photographer…

Gallery 98 was founded in part to help promote the legendary artist group Collaborative Projects Inc. (COLAB), whose activities in the 1980s still resonate in today’s art world. COLAB organized the Real Estate Show and the Times Square Show (both in 1980), and was intricately connected to two influential alternative…

Gallery 98’s online exhibitions continue to resurrect important art and artists from the 1970s and ’80s. The art press and blogs have noticed. Here are some informed articles that expand the focus on artists we have featured. “Poster Boy,” by Bruce Helander, Huffington Post, September…

Gallery 98 has been featured in recent articles, highlighting alternative publications and exhibitions, as well as interviews with curator Marc H. Miller.

Gallery 98 has added new items to our inventory, including a rare 1985 poster—illustrated by a pointed Jenny Holzer text—for what proved to be a controversial exhibition curated by the Guerrilla Girls. When the Guerrilla Girls, in their campaign for gender equality, criticized the Palladium for ignoring women artists, the nightclub…

At the heart of the cultural renaissance in downtown New York during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s was a DIY (do-it-yourself) attitude that spawned not only new music, art, clubs and galleries but also a host of alternative publications that covered all the new action.

The No Wave films produced in downtown New York in the 1970s and 1980s remain an intriguing hybrid of art, fashion, music, and performance. No film was more evocative of the No Wave genre than Amos Poe’s The Foreigner, with its noir narrative and glamorous cast of musicians, artists and nightlife…

Much of the art featured on Gallery 98 is connected with Collaborative Projects Inc.(COLAB), a loosely organized artists’ group that helped lead the shift towards more socially engaged art in the 1980s. One of COLAB’s most notorious actions was The Real Estate Show, a theme exhibition about real estate that took place…