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…

Gallery 98 is participating in The Last Party, an exhibition curated by Anthony Haden-Guest spotlighting the “creative ferment” that surrounded the New York club scene in the 1970s and ’80s. The exhibition includes many of Gallery 98’s favorite artists, such as: Roberta Bayley, Neke Carson, David Godlis, Curt Hoppe, Marc H. Miller, Anton Perich, Marcia Resnick, Bettie…

Gallery 98 is lending works to the The Last Party, an upcoming exhibition curated by Anthony Haden-Guest that will spotlight the “creative ferment” that exploded around the New York club scene in the 1970s and ’80s. The Last Party opens next Wednesday, June 17, at the non-profit art space White Box on Broome…

The downtown art world of the 1970s and ’80s was mostly separate from the established uptown galleries where works sold for high prices to the art elite. Downtown was a low-budget affair, a place where artists exhibited in shabby do-it-yourself spaces that catered mostly to other young and broke artists.

Last week’s email calling attention to the historic “Punk Art” exhibition catalogue (1978) posted on 98bowery.com seems to have struck a responsive chord. Most gratifying is the Huffington Post article “16 Images That Capture The Dark And Beautiful Love Affair Between Art And Punk.”…

Gallery 98 features art and ephemera from the radical fringes of downtown New York during the 1970s and ’80s. These were the years when artists turned away from abstraction and began to confront real-life issues, including politics and sexual identity. 98 Bowery, the parent site of Gallery 98, tells this history as…

Artist Anton Van Dalen has long found both a purpose and an audience in the community of the East Village, where he has lived for more than forty years. In the 1980s, his street posters—which addressed the neighborhood’s rampant social ills—became familiar sights for local residents. These were the years when much of the…

Working closely with the artists and musicians who were at the center of East Village culture in the 1970s and 1980s, Gallery 98 offers collectors and institutions rare objects that bear witness to one of New York’s most creative periods. We have recently replenished our supply of the East Village Eye, Leonard Abrams’…