Explore Downtown New York Art

The following text is adapted from and expands on Lynn Gumpert's introduction for Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965, published by the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, and DelMonico Books · Prestel, on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name in winter 2017.

Please scroll to the bottom of this webpage to find links to a variety of scholarly resources on Downtown New York art, including additional essays and walking tours.

New York University is located in one of Downtown New York’s epicenters, Greenwich Village. The history of artists living and working Downtown is not new to the Grey Art Museum, which was founded in 1975 at 100 Washington Square East as NYU’s fine arts museum. Works by Downtown artists constitute one of the strengths of the NYU Art Collection, begun in 1958. The prominent rise of American art in the 1940s, more specifically Abstract Expressionism, is well known and documented. Key Downtown hangouts at the time included the Waldorf Cafeteria at Sixth Avenue and West Eighth Street, the Club, on East Eighth Street, and, of course, the Cedar Tavern on University Place.

A number of exhibitions during the Grey’s some fifty years have focused on Downtown art. Among them are Precious: An American Cottage Industry of the Eighties, which focused on work from the booming East Village scene, in 1985; Rudy Burckhardt and Friends: New York Artists of the 1950s and ’60s in 2000; The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984 in 2006;  New York Cool: Painting and Sculpture from the NYU Art Collection in 2008; Downtown Pix: Mining the Fales Archives, 1961–1991 in 2010; Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life in 2011; and Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg in 2013. Key among these exhibitions is New York Cool, which comprised, as the title denotes, a selection of Downtown works from the Grey Art Museum's permanent collection. Guest-curated by NYU professor Pepe Karmel, the show took its name from Irving Sandler’s 1965 article “The New Cool-Art.” [1] One of the goals of the show and the accompanying book was “to trace how New York School art evolved from the ‘hot,’ gestural style of the early 1950s to the ‘cool,’ hard-edged style of the early ’60s.” But the story that Karmel eloquently reveals and that the works convincingly convey isn’t that simple or straightforward. Figuration was still being produced and, indeed, experienced a breakthrough. Abstraction continued to be practiced in a painterly, expressionistic manner while more geometric-inspired works also surfaced. There was, Karmel posits concisely and directly, “an incredible variety of art being made during those years.” [2] 

The Grey's 2017 exhibition, Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965, communicated, much more fully than selections from the NYU Art Collection ever could, the extent of that variety. It also uncovered a more diverse history and reveals how artists themselves, by creating their own exhibition spaces, took on, to a certain extent, a form of critical discourse and, in so doing, could act themselves as cultural arbiters. They refused to be ignored and, by mounting their own work for public viewing, eventually effected a major shift of the art market away from Midtown and the Upper East Side, to Downtown.  

The Grey’s role as a steward of Downtown New York Art was further solidified in 2021 with a landmark gift of over 200 artworks by Downtown artists from the past 50 years, donated by longtime art patrons and social activists James Cottrell and Joseph Lovett. The museum's 2022 exhibition Mostly New: Selections from the NYU Art Collection served as the inaugural showcase for the Cottrell-Lovett Collection. Figurative works by luminaries like Keith Haring and Andy Warhol introduced viewers to other influential figures of the downtown arts scene in the 1980s, such as dancers Bill T. Jones and Jock Soto. Work by artist Donald Baechler, who emerged in the ’80s as part of the East Village creative community alongside the likes of Warhol and Haring, revealed the artist’s interest in formal issues of line, shape, and color. A late painting by Grace Hartigan, an influential member of the New York School, showed how the artist blended her signature Abstract Expressionist sensibility with a renewed interest in the figure. Capturing the spirit of the Downtown artist community, Cottrell and Lovett's donation cemented the museum’s commitment to the artists who lived and worked in its own backyard.

END NOTES

1. Irving Sandler, “The New Cool-Art,” Art in America 53, no. 1 (February 1965), 96.

2. Pepe Karmel, “An In-Between Era,” in New York Cool: Painting and Sculpture from the NYU Art Collection (New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 2008), 21–25.