The Real Estate Show was a squatted exhibition by New York artists' group Colab, on the subject of landlord speculation in real estate [1] held on New Year's Day (January 1, 1980) in a vacant city-owned building at 123 Delancey Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City. [2] [3]
The squatting action followed a year of campaigning to rent the property for an exhibition space from officials of the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). [4]
On New Year's Day, the show was officially opened to the public. [5] It was to be a two-week occupation/exhibit but was quickly closed down by the police. This brief exhibition went on to inspire a much larger and longer lasting Colab exhibition called The Times Square Show .
On the morning of January 2, the Colab artists discovered the storefront padlocked shut and their work locked inside. Phone calls revealed it to be the doing of HPD. The Real Estate Show had been open exactly one day. [6]
On January 8, the artists, accompanied by art dealer Ronald Feldman and German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, at the invitation of Art Corp. Inc. co-founder John DiLeva-Halpern, assembled at the site to protest its closing in the company of reporters from the New York Times, SoHo Weekly News, and the East Village Eye. [7] There was a photograph taken of Beuys at the front door of The Real Estate Show standing with John DiLeva-Halpern, Ronald Feldman, Alan W. Moore and Joseph Nechvatal taken that day. [8]
On January 11 city workers swept into 123 Delancey, cleared out the exhibited work and trucked it to an uptown warehouse. It was not until a few days later that artists were granted entry into the warehouse to take their artworks home. [9]
On January 16, a deal was reached with the city that gave birth to ABC No Rio when the artists were given control of nearby 156 Rivington Street as a compromise. [10]
In early 2014, there were four concurrent art exhibitions in New York City around The Real Estate Show: at James Fuentes Gallery, ABC No Rio, the Lodge Gallery, and Cuchifritos Gallery/Essex Street Market. [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]
In June 2017, Becky Howland & Matthias Mayer curated The Real Estate Show at Spor Klubu in Berlin, drawing from documentation of the original Real Estate Show (1980) from the Archive Collection of the extant project space ABC No Rio. Included in the show were Robert Cooney, Mitch Corber, Peter Fend, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Bobby G (aka Robert Goldman), Ilona Granet, Becky Howland, Christof Kohlhofer, Gregory Lehmann, Ann Messner, Peter Mönnig, Alan W. Moore, Joseph Nechvatal, Cara Perlman, Scott Pfaffman, Christy Rupp and Robin Winters. In conjunction with this show, another exhibition called The Real Estate Show Extended/Berlin: Group exhibition on the subject of Gentrification, Real Estate Speculation and Selling out the City was presented at Kunstpunkt Berlin. This show included many Berlin artists along with four original members of the Real Estate Show (1980): Becky Howland, Peter Mönnig, Alan Moore, and Joseph Nechvatal. Howland, Mönnig, Moore and Nechvatal also participated in a panel discussion on Real Estate and Art on June 3, 2017 that was moderated by Howard McCalebb of Dada Post, Berlin. [16]
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.
Tom Otterness is an American sculptor best known as one of America's most prolific public artists. Otterness's works adorn parks, plazas, subway stations, libraries, courthouses and museums around the world, notably in New York City's Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City and Life Underground in the 14th Street – Eighth Avenue New York Subway station. He contributed a balloon to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 1994 he was elected as a member of the National Academy Museum.
ABC No Rio is a collectively-run non-profit arts organization on New York City's Lower East Side. It was founded in 1980 in a squat at 156 Rivington Street, following the eviction of the 1979-80 Real Estate Show. The centre featured an art gallery space, a zine library, a darkroom, a silkscreening studio, and public computer lab. In addition, it played host to a number of radical projects including weekly hardcore punk matinees and the city Food Not Bombs collective.
Kiki Smith is a German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side, New York City, and the Hudson Valley, New York State.
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.
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.
Joseph Nechvatal is an American post-conceptual digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses.
Walter Robinson is a New York City-based painter, publisher, art curator and art writer. He has been called a Neo-pop painter, as well as a member of the 1980s The Pictures Generation.
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.
Alan W. Moore is an art historian and activist whose work addresses cultural economies and groups and the politics of collectivity. After a stint as an art critic, Moore made video art and installation art from the mid-1970s on and performed in the 1979 Public Arts International/Free Speech series. He has published several books and runs the House Magic information project on self-organized, occupied autonomous social centers. His partial autobiography was published in 2022 in The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest as Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld. Moore lives in Madrid.
Coleen Fitzgibbon is an American experimental film artist associated with Collaborative Projects, Inc.. She worked under the pseudonym Colen Fitzgibbon between the years 1973–1980. Fitzgibbon currently resides on Ludlow Street in New York City and in Montana.
Mitch Corber is a New York City neo-Beat poet, an eccentric performance artist, and no wave videographer known for his rapid whimsically comical montage and collage style. He has been associated with Collaborative Projects, Inc., participated in Public Arts International/Free Speech and The Times Square Show, and is creator-director of cable TV long-running weekly series Poetry Thin Air in New York City and its on-line poetry/video archive. He has worked closely with ABC No Rio, Colab TV and the MWF Video Club and his audio art have been published on Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine three times. He is a recipient of a NY Foundation for the Arts Fellowship grant (1987) in the field of emerging artforms.
Robin Winters is an American conceptual artist and teacher based in New York. Winters is known for creating solo exhibitions containing an interactive durational performance component to his installations, sometimes lasting up to two months. As an early practitioner of Relational Aesthetics Winters has incorporated such devices as blind dates, double dates, dinners, fortune telling, and free consultation in his performances. Throughout his career he has engaged in a wide variety of media, such as performance art, film, video, writing prose and poetry, photography, installation art, printmaking, drawing, painting, ceramic sculpture, bronze sculpture, and glassblowing. Recurring imagery in his work includes faces, boats, cars, bottles, hats, and the fool.
Joe Lewis is a post-conceptual non-media specific American artist and educator. Lewis was co-founding director of Fashion Moda in New York, where he curated and mounted numerous exhibitions and performance events. He also early on has been associated with Colab and ABC No Rio
Jane Dickson is an American painter. She lives and works in New York City..
Christy Rupp is an American artist and activist.
Cave Girls is a 1984 New York No Wave underground film by Kiki Smith created on Super 8 between 1981 and 1984. that makes use of Stan Brakhage-like montage cutting.
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.