Artists Space

Last updated

Artists Space at 80 White Street. 80 White Street Exterior .jpg
Artists Space at 80 White Street.

Artists Space is a non-profit art gallery and arts organization first established at 155 Wooster Street in SoHo, Manhattan, New York City. Founded in 1972 by Irving Sandler and Trudie Grace and funded by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Artists Space provided an alternative support structure for young, emerging artists, separate from the museum and commercial gallery system. [1] Artists Space has historically been engaged in critical dialogues surrounding institutional critique, racism, the AIDS crisis, [2] and Occupy Wall Street. [3] As of 2019, Artists Space is located at 11 Cortlandt Alley in the Financial District of Manhattan. [4]

Contents

History

During its first year, 21 prominent artists were chosen to produce a one-person exhibition, and chose three unaffiliated artists to show work simultaneously. [1] Artists such as Romare Bearden, Vito Acconci, Dan Flavin, Nancy Graves, Sol LeWitt, Philip Pearlstein, Dorothea Rockburne, Lucas Samaras, and Jack Youngerman were among those chosen to exhibit and select artists. [5] The system provided artists with a great amount of curatorial agency, and the opportunity for emerging artists to gain visibility.

Several artists support services were also established early on, including the Visiting Artists Lecture Series, the Emergency Materials Fund, and the Independent Exhibitions Program. [1] These programs were designed to provide visibility and financial assistance to artists, as well as opportunities to exhibit outside of Artists Space. [1] The Emergency Materials Fund provided grants to artists to present their work at an established non-profit venue, while the Independent Exhibitions Program supported the needs of unaffiliated artists who were producing and presenting their work without institutional sponsorship. [6]

In 1974, The Unaffiliated Artists File was established, later shortened to the "Artists File" in 1983. [7] The file was originally composed solely of unaffiliated, New York-based artists, then was expanded to include artists across the United States, and eventually, to include 3000 artists located internationally. [1] The Artists File was both a free database open to the public as well as a service for representing a wide range of independent artists. Artists Space regularly organized group exhibitions entitled Selections, which featured registered artists from the File. [7] The Artists File was one of the largest artists registries in the world, with more than 10,000 users. [1] It was digitized in 1986. [1]

Notable exhibitions and programming

In 1974, Edit DeAk organized PersonA, a photo and video performance series focusing on autobiography and institutional critique of the art world. [8] The series took place over four consecutive evenings. [9]

In 1977, Douglas Crimp curated Pictures, an exhibition featuring the work of Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine and Robert Longo. [10] The show featured multimedia works including photography, film, performance as well as painting, drawing, and sculpture. [10] After first being exhibited at Artists Space, the exhibition traveled to the Allen Art Museum, Oberlin, the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, and the University of Colorado Museum, Boulder. [10] Crimp stated about the show:

"In choosing the word pictures for this show, I hoped to convey not only the work's most salient characteristic-recognizable images-but also and importantly the ambiguities it sustains. As is typical of what has come to be called postmodernism, this new work is not confined to any particular medium....Picture, used colloquially, is also nonspecific: a picture book might be a book of drawings or photographs, and in common speech a painting, drawing, or print is often called, simply, a picture. Equally important for my purposes, picture, in its verb form, can refer to a mental process as well as the production of an aesthetic object." [10]

In 1978, Artists Space served as a site of inception for the No Wave movement, hosting a five night underground no wave music festival, organized by artists Michael Zwack and Robert Longo, that featured ten local bands; including Rhys Chatham's The Gynecologists, Communists, Glenn Branca's Theoretical Girls, Terminal, Rhys Chatham's Tone Death (performing his composition for electric guitars Guitar Trio) [11] and Daily Life. [12] [13] The final two days of the show featured DNA and the Contortions on Friday, followed by Mars and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks on Saturday. [13] English musician and producer Brian Eno, who had originally come to New York to produce the second Talking Heads album More Songs About Buildings and Food , was in the audience. [13] Impressed by what he saw and heard, and advised by Diego Cortez to do so, Eno was convinced that this movement should be documented and proposed the idea of a compilation album, No New York, with himself as a producer. [14]

In 1979, the gallery hosted an exhibition of black-and-white photographs and charcoal drawings by white artist Donald Newman entitled "Nigger Drawings". [15] Linda Goode Bryant of Just Above Midtown Gallery and her colleague Janet Henry mobilized [16] a coalition of artists and critics including Lucy Lippard, Carl Andre, May Stevens, Edit DeAk, Faith Ringgold, and Howardena Pindell, who acted as the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition [3] and published an open letter criticizing the exhibition. [17] They also organized two "teach-in" demonstrations, but only one was successfully held as the gallery locked its doors. [18] Another coalition of artists and critics including Roberta Smith, Laurie Anderson, Rosalind E. Krauss, Craig Owens, Douglas Crimp, and Stephen Koch published an open letter defending the exhibition and the choice of its title. [19] Director Helene Winer argued that the context of the title was not racist in intention, and that art is "a territory where everything can be explored, discussed, revalued." She apologized, stating, "We were not politically or socially sensitive to the implications of using that title in a publicly funded art gallery. I feel very badly for those who were legitimately offended." [19] [20] Artists from the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition insisted on Artists Space being held accountable for the show in the "reality of social-political structure", [21] while artist John Chandler called on Artists Space to "become the alternative space it is truly meant to be" and not "mirror the subtle racism that exists throughout the art world." [21]

In 2011, Artists Space offered its resources to movements like Strike Debt and Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), holding a series of lectures and meeting inciting dialogue on art's indisputable relation to politics. [3] Artists Space formed a research partnership with W.A.G.E that led to the development of W.A.G.E's current certification program, which credits non-profit art organizations that commit to paying artists fees that meet their minimum payment standards. [3] [22]

From January to March 2016, Artists Space hosted the exhibition 91020000 by Cameron Rowland, wherein Rowland purchased various units from an affordable manufacturing company named Corcraft that relies on underpaid prison labor. [23] For another work, Disengorgement, Rowland purchased 90 shares of Aetna, who previously issued slave insurance to slaveowners [23] in order to establish the "Reparations Purpose Trust." The trust states that it is to be held until "the effective date of any official action by any branch of the United States government to make financial reparations for slavery." [24]

From September to December 2016, Decolonize This Place conducted a residency at Artists Space, where the Books & Talks location (55 Walker Street) functioned as a headquarters and meeting place for artists and organizers across New York City, many of whom were tied to decolonial resistance at national and global scales. [3]

Timeline of Directors

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Gober</span> American sculptor

Robert Gober is an American sculptor. His work is often related to domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Punk visual art</span> Visual arts within the punk subculture

Punk visual art is artwork associated with the punk subculture and the No wave movement. It is prevalent in punk rock album covers, flyers for punk concerts and punk zines, but has also been prolific in other mediums, such as the visual arts, the performing arts, literature and cinema. Punk manifested itself "differently but consistently" in different cultural spheres. Punk also led to the birth of several movements: new wave, no wave, dark wave, industrial, hardcore, queercore, etc., which are sometimes showcased in art galleries and exhibition spaces. The punk aesthetic was a dominant strand from 1982 to 1986 in the many art galleries of the East Village of Manhattan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Colab</span> New York City artists group

Colab is the commonly used abbreviation of the New York City artists' group Collaborative Projects, which was formed after a series of open meetings between artists of various disciplines.

Lance Fung Gallery (1996-2003) was an art gallery of contemporary art once located at 537 Broadway in New York City where it shared an exhibition space with the Emily Harvey Gallery.

Vincent Como is a Brooklyn-based visual artist. His work is rooted in Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Color Field Painting with a specific focus toward Black. Como has referenced the influence of Ad Reinhardt and Kasimir Malevich, as well as movements such as the Italian Arte Povera movement from the 1960s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fulcrum Gallery</span>

Fulcrum Gallery was an American art gallery that opened underneath the Guggenheim Museum SoHo in New York City in January 1993, by Valerie Monroe Shakespeare. It was designed by her husband, Tery Fugate-Wilcox, who contributed the gallery motto: "Without Art we are but Monkeys with Car Keys". Fugate-Wilcox is credited as photographer on all of the gallery's ads, and was listed as one of the nineteen artists represented by the gallery. The owner said in an interview, that the name "Fulcrum", came from Archimedes, "Give me a place to stand, a lever long enough and a fulcrum. and I can move the Earth". She said she hoped Fulcrum would become a "pivotal point in art history". Fulcrum Gallery was founded to exhibit Actual Art exclusively and did so until the effects of the attacks of 9/11 caused the gallery to close in February 2002.

Brian Christopher Rutenberg is an American abstract painter.

The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 was an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City that ran from April 29 – August 2, 2009. The exhibition took its name from Pictures, a 1977 five person group show organized by art historian and critic Douglas Crimp (1944–2019) at New York City's Artists Space gallery. The artists exhibited from September 24 to October 29, 1977 were Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith.

Christopher D’Arcangelo was an American artist who worked in the 1970s until his death in 1979. He was the son of the American painter Allan D'Arcangelo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marlborough Fine Art</span>

Marlborough Fine Art was founded in London in 1946 by Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer. In 1963, a gallery was opened as Marlborough-Gerson in Manhattan, New York, at the Fuller Building on Madison Avenue and 57th Street, which later relocated in 1971 to its present location, 40 West 57th Street. The gallery operates another New York space on West 25th Street, which opened in 2007. It briefly opened a Lower East Side space on Broome Street.

Claudia Gould is an art curator and former Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director of The Jewish Museum in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catherine de Zegher</span> Belgian curator, art critic, and art historian

Catherine de Zegher is a Belgian curator and a modern and contemporary art historian. She has a degree in art history and archaeology from the University of Ghent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Valerie Hegarty</span> American artist (born 1967)

Valerie Hegarty is an American painter, sculptor, and installation artist. She is known for irreverent, often critical works that replicate canonical paintings, furnishings, and architectural spaces from American or personal history undergoing various processes of transformation. Hegarty most often portrays her recreations in meticulously realized, trompe l’oeil states of decay, ruin, or physical attack related to their circumstances. Her work examines American historical themes involving colonization, slavery, Manifest Destiny, nationalism, art-historical movements and their ideological tenets, romantic conceptions of nature, and environmental degradation. Sculpture critic Robin Reisenfeld wrote that among other things, Hegarty's art is "informed by 19th-century American landscape painting as an expression of the sublime, as well as by the manufacturing of two-dimensional 'masterworks' to be destroyed in three-dimensional fashion in order to evoke entropic forces of growth and decay."

Helene Winer is an American art gallery owner and curator. She co-owned Metro Pictures Gallery in New York City with Janelle Reiring. Metro Pictures closed in late 2021. Her career deeply involved the postmodern artists of the 1970s and 1980s known as the Pictures Generation. She lives in Tribeca.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Janet Henry</span> American artist

Janet Henry is a visual artist based in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robin Tewes</span> American painter

Robin Tewes is a Queens-born, New York City-based artist, known since the early 1980s for her representational paintings of frozen, narrative-like moments. She has shown her work in numerous solo exhibitions in New York City, as well as nationally and internationally, and exhibited at venues including P.S. 1, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, The Drawing Center, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), among many. Her work has been widely discussed in publications including Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Tema Celeste, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Village Voice. Tewes was a founding member of the P.S. 122 Painting Association. She has been recognized with a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (2015) and Painting Award (2008), an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award (2007), and inclusion in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cameron Rowland</span> American artist

Cameron Rowland is an American conceptual artist whose work has been exhibited internationally and acclaimed for its structural analytic approach to addressing issues of American slavery, mass incarceration, and reparations. Rowland graduated from Wesleyan University in 2011 and they were awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 after several solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunsthal Aarhus, and La Biennale de Montreal. Rowland is noted for their distinct method of loaning some works to collectors and institutions rather than selling them outright, an approach meant to mirror the experience of low-income people shopping at rent-to-own stores like Rent-A-Center and disrupt the traditional value structure in the contemporary art market.

Four Walls was an artist collaborative event space. From 1984 to 2000, it hosted a wide range of one night activities, such as artist conversations, panel discussions, exhibitions, screenings and performances. The organization consisted of two consecutive phases from 1984 to 1988 in Hoboken, New Jersey and from 1991 to 2000 in the Greenpoint Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Throughout its life Four Walls was situated in growing creative communities where it served to encourage an exchange of ideas and generated alternative ways of experiencing art.

Daniel S. Palmer is an American curator and art historian. Palmer is currently Chief Curator at the SCAD Museum of Art. He was previously the Curator at Public Art Fund, New York, where he organized 18 exhibitions from 2016 to 2022. Before that, he held the position of the Leon Levy Assistant Curator at the Jewish Museum, New York and was a curatorial research assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He received his PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2021. He also holds a M.Phil in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center and a BA from Rutgers University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cinque Gallery</span>

The Cinque Gallery (1969–2004) was co-founded by artists Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, and Norman Lewis as an outgrowth of the Black power movement to "provide a place where the works of unknown, and neglected artists of talent …" — primarily Black artists — "would not only be shown but nurtured and developed". "Relying on a series of volunteers, Cinque hosted solo, group, and touring exhibitions," and sponsored an artist-in-residence program, which was inaugurated with collagist Nanette Carter.

References

Citations

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Gould, Claudia; Smith, Valerie (1998). 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space: 25 Years. Distributed Art Publishers. p. 27.
  2. ↑ Colucci, Emily (October 4, 2017). "Did The AIDS Epidemic Change the Way We Understand Art?: Sophie Junge's "Art About AIDS"".
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 McCanne, Michael (December 5, 2016). "Causes and Effects: Decolonize This Place at Artists Space". Art in America.
  4. ↑ Farago, Jason (December 12, 2019). "Artists Space Re-emerges as an Enduring Downtown Alternative". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved April 30, 2024.
  5. ↑ Grace, Trudie (Summer 1975). "Artists Space". Art Journal. 34 (4): 323–326. doi:10.1080/00043249.1975.10793703 – via JSTOR.
  6. ↑ Gould, Claudia; Smith, Valerie (1998). 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space: 25 Years. Distributed Art Publishers. p. 322.
  7. 1 2 Gould, Claudia; Smith, Valerie (1998). 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space: 25 Years. Distributed Arts Publishers. p. 321.
  8. ↑ "PersonA: Organized by Edit DeAk". Archived from the original on July 28, 2017. Retrieved May 14, 2019.
  9. ↑ Russeth, Andrew (November 11, 2013). "That Time That Jack Smith Said That Artists Should Throw Themselves Down Stairs". The New York Observer .
  10. 1 2 3 4 Crimp, Douglas (Spring 1979). "Pictures". October. 8: 75–88. doi:10.2307/778227. JSTOR   778227.
  11. ↑ Patrick Nickleson, The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute, University of Michigan Press, p. 158
  12. ↑ Patrick Nickleson, The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute, University of Michigan Press, pp. 151–157
  13. 1 2 3 Reynolds 2005, p. 146.
  14. ↑ Reynolds 2005, p. 147.
  15. ↑ "The Nigger Drawings, Donald". artistsspace.org. Archived from the original on October 16, 2019. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  16. ↑ Mitter, Siddhartha (March 29, 2017). "Revolutionary Sisters: Artwork Forged in the Crucible of Battle over Feminism". The Village Voice.
  17. ↑ "Open Letter to Artists Space".
  18. ↑ Trescott, Jacqueline; Trescott, Jacqueline (May 2, 1979). "Minorities and the Visual Arts: Controversy Before the Endowment". The Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  19. 1 2 Glueck, Grace (April 14, 1979). ""Racism" Protest Slated Over Title of Art Show". The New York Times.
  20. ↑ Henry, Joseph (September 11, 2014). "Sources of Harm: Notes on the Alternative Artworld". Hyperallergic. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  21. 1 2 Blair, Eileen (April 26, 1979). "Pure Art or 'Brutality Chic': Artists Space Accused of Racism over Exhibit Title". The Village Voice.
  22. ↑ "Artists Respond to W.A.G.E. Open Forum with Hans Abbing". Rhizome. January 24, 2012.
  23. 1 2 Trouillot, Terrence (March 4, 2016). "CAMERON ROWLAND 91020000". The Brooklyn Rail.
  24. ↑ Rodney, Seph (March 3, 2016). "The Products of Forced Labor in US Prisons". Hyperallergic.
  25. ↑ Gould, Claudia; Smith, Valerie (1998). 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space: 25 Years. Distributed Art Publishers. pp. 326–327.

Works cited

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.