No wave was an avant-garde music genre and visual art scene which emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was a pun based on the rejection of commercial new wave music. Reacting against punk rock's recycling of rock and roll clichés, no wave musicians instead experimented with noise, dissonance, and atonality, as well as non-rock genres like free jazz, funk, and disco. The scene often reflected an abrasive, confrontational, and nihilistic world view.
Fred Brathwaite, more popularly known as Fab 5 Freddy, is an American visual artist, filmmaker, and hip hop pioneer. He is considered one of the architects of the street art movement. Freddy emerged in New York's downtown underground creative scene in the late 1970s as a graffiti artist. He was the bridge between the burgeoning uptown rap scene and the downtown No Wave art scene. He was immortalized in 1981 when Debbie Harry rapped on the Blondie song "Rapture" that "Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly." In the late 1980s, Freddy became the first host of the groundbreaking hip-hop music video show Yo! MTV Raps.
John McLoughlin, better known by the stage name John Sex, was an American cabaret singer and performance artist in New York City from the late 1970s until his death in late 1990.
Gordon Stevenson was an artist, actor, musician and filmmaker who died of AIDS in 1982, one of the East Village art community’s first casualties of the AIDS epidemic.
Club 57 was a nightclub located at 57 St. Mark's Place in the East Village, New York City during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was originally founded by Stanley Zbigniew Strychacki as well as Dominic Rose. Then enhanced by nightclub performer Ann Magnuson, Susan Hannaford, and poet Tom Scully. It was a hangout and venue for performance and visual artists and musicians, including The Cramps, Madonna, Keith Haring, Cyndi Lauper, Charles Busch, Klaus Nomi, The B-52s, RuPaul, Futura 2000, Tron von Hollywood, Kenny Scharf, Frank Holliday, John Sex, Wendy Wild, The Fall, April Palmieri, Peter Kwaloff, Robert Carrithers, The Fleshtones, The Fuzztones, Joey Arias, Lypsinka, Michael Musto, Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Fab Five Freddy, Jacek Tylicki, and to a lesser extent, Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Maripol is an artist, film producer, fashion designer and stylist. She has had an influence on the looks of influential artists such as Madonna and Grace Jones. As part of the 1980s New York downtown scene, she captured the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Debbie Harry with her Polaroid camera. Maripol also produced films, most notably Downtown 81.
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.
Anya Phillips was a Taiwanese fashion designer and the co-founder of the New York nightclub the Mudd Club. Phillips influenced the fashion, sound, and look of the New York-based no wave scene of the late 1970s. She was also the manager and girlfriend of musician James Chance.
Michael Thomas Holman is a New York-based artist, writer, filmmaker and musician. He is also an early 1980s downtown scene subculturalist and creator of the Hip Hop music program Graffiti Rock. Holman is a founding member, along with Jean-Michel Basquiat, of the experimental band Gray.
Glenn O'Brien was an American writer who focused largely on the subjects of art, music, and fashion. He was featured for many years as "The Style Guy" in GQ magazine and published a book with that title. He worked as a writer and editor at a number of publications, including Rolling Stone, Playboy, Interview, High Times, Spin, and Details. He also published the arts and literature magazine Bald Ego from 2003 to 2005.
Tier 3 was an influential but short-lived 300-capacity no wave art nightclub in New York. Founded by Hilary Jaeger in 1979, Tier 3 was a major venue in the city's underground music and counterculture post-punk art scene, along with the Mudd Club. Live performances showcased punk rock, no wave, ska, noise music, free jazz, new wave and experimental music. The club was located at 225 West Broadway in the TriBeCa neighborhood of lower Manhattan.
Scott B and Beth B were among the best-known New York No Wave underground film makers of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
James Allan Curtis, known professionally as Diego Cortez, was an American filmmaker and art curator closely associated with the no wave period in New York City. Cortez was the co-founder of the Mudd Club, and he curated the influential post-punk art show New York/New Wave, which brought the then aspiring artist Jean-Michel Basquiat to fame.
Boris Policeband was a no wave noise music performer who used dissonant violin, police radio transmissions, and voice. Boris Pearlman was a classically trained violist from New York City.
Underground U.S.A. is a 1980 feature-length underground film directed by Eric Mitchell and starring Patti Astor, Rene Ricard, Jackie Curtis, Cookie Mueller, Tom Wright, John Lurie, and Taylor Mead. Future director Jim Jarmusch was the sound recordist on this film.
Gray is an American experimental band formed by artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and filmmaker Michael Holman in 1979, of whom filmmaker Vincent Gallo was also a member. The group was influenced by the members' artist backgrounds and the sonic experimentation of their contemporaries in New York's No Wave scene. Gray performed at venues such as the Mudd Club and CBGB which were the epicenter of New York's underground scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The Fun Gallery was an art gallery founded by Patti Astor and Bill Stelling in 1981. The Fun Gallery had a cultural impact until it closed in 1985. As the first art gallery in Manhattan's East Village, it exposed New York to the talents of street art by showcasing graffiti artists like Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000, Lee Quiñones, Zephyr, Dondi, Lady Pink, and ERO. Contemporary artists Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring also had solo exhibitions at the Fun Gallery.
The Times Square Show was an influential collaborative, self-curated, and self-generated art exhibition held by New York artists' group Colab in Times Square in a shuttered massage parlor at 201 W. 41st and 7th Avenue during the entire month of June in 1980. The Times Square Show was largely inspired by the more radical Colab show The Real Estate Show, but unlike it, was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in what was then a Times Square full of porno theaters, peep shows, and red light establishments. In addition to experimental painting and sculpture, the exhibition incorporated music, fashion, and an ambitious program of performance and video. For many artists the exhibition served as a forum for the exchange of ideas, a testing-ground for social-directed figurative work in progress, and a catalyst for exploring new political-artistic directions.
New York/New Wave was an exhibition curated by Diego Cortez in 1981. Held at the Long Island City gallery P.S.1, it documented the crossover between the downtown art and music scenes. The show featured a coalition of No wave musicians, painters, graffiti artists, poets, and photographers.
The Offenders is a 1980 American No Wave color Super 8 film directed by Scott B and Beth B that, as a punk melodrama, post-modernly refers back to the 1921 melodrama film The Offenders directed by Fenwicke L. Holmes. It originally was presented as a serial that screened at Max's Kansas City and the Mudd Club whereby each week the attendees paid for the making of next week's episodes.
