MAY
The EAST VILLAGE EYE publishes its premier issue. Founded by Leonard Abrams, the paper mirrors the rise and demise of the scene like no other; between its first and its final issue, in January 1987, the Eye evolves from a tabloid-style monthly into a bigger, slicker source of alternative news.
CLUB 57 opens in the basement of the Holy Cross Polish National Church at 57 St. Mark’s Place (see above).
FEBRUARY
“NEW YORK/NEW WAVE” brings together graffiti art, the denizens of Club 57, and the aesthetic offshoots of New Wave music at P.S. 1 in Queens. Like the “Times Square Show” a year earlier, Diego Cortez’s exhibition proves seminal for the incipient East Village scene.
MAY
LIFE CAFE, a “village-style” coffee house featuring poetry readings, performances, and art and fashion shows, opens at 343 E. 10th Street.
JUNE
FUN GALLERY opens at 229 E. 11th Street (see Charlie Ahearn on Fun Gallery).
MARCH
51X GALLERY, Rich Colicchio and Ed Kurpell’s Fun-inspired space, opens at 51 St. Mark’s Place.
GRACIE MANSION opens “Loo Division,” a gallery in the bathroom of her 432 E. 9th Street apartment. By the third show, the BBC shows up as crowds line the block (see Carlo McCormick on Gracie Mansion Gallery).
MAY
CIVILIAN WARFARE opens at 526 E. 11th Street. Billed as “the most unusual gallery in New York City,” owners Dean Savard and Alan Barrows show the work of David Wojnarowicz, Luis Frangella, Judy Glantzman, Greer Lankton, Betsy Rosenwald, and Kathleen Thomas, among others.
NATURE MORTE GALLERY—pronounced in American at the insistence of artist-founders Peter Nagy and Alan Belcher—opens at 204 E. 10th Street (see p. 129). In pointed contrast to the street-chic aesthetics celebrated around the corner at Gracie Mansion, Fun, and Civilian Warfare, Nature Morte champions Pop-inflected, Conceptually oriented work, which will later be picked up by galleries like International With Monument and C.A.S.H.
SEPTEMBER
Artist/writer NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE introduces the East Village scene to a broader audience in a pair of articles, the first in Arts Magazine, the second, three months later, in GQ.
FUN opens in roomier quarters at 254 E. 10th Street with Kenny Scharf’s psychedelic Flintstone paintings.
OCTOBER
NAN GOLDIN’s evolving slide show (the core of the later “Ballad of Sexual Dependency”) gets a pair of early viewings at Club 57 and the Pyramid.
NOVEMBER
ARTFORUM looks in on the Fun with the publication of Rene Ricard’s “The Pledge of Allegiance,” an appreciation of the nascent scene centered at the gallery.
GRACIE MANSION’s “The Famous Show” brings together more than a hundred portraits of celebrities, from Merv Griffin to Pinky Lee, in her temporary quarters at 15 St. Mark’s Place.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT opens at Fun.
EAST 7TH STREET GALLERY inaugurates its quarters at 117 E. 7th Street, bringing the number of East Village galleries to SIX by year’s close.
FEBRUARY
KEITH HARING and graffiti writer L.A. Rock (alias L.A. II) tag the interior of the Fun Gallery. The unofficial curator for Club 57, Haring is already known for his chalk cartoons of barking dogs and radiant babies, familiar sights on subway platforms throughout the city.
MARCH
JOHN FEKNER’s enormous stenciled mural “Toxic Junkie” appears on cinder-block tenement facade on E. 3rd Street between Avenues B and C.
The NEW MATH GALLERY opens at 508 E. 12th Street. At age twenty, Mario Fernandez (who founded the space with partner Nina Seigenfeld) becomes the neighborhood’s youngest gallerist.
PIEZO ELECTRIC opens at 29 Clinton Street. Early shows mounted by proprietors Doug Milford and Elizabeth McDonald include “29 Artists from the Lower East Side” and “The Wild West Show.”
APRIL
GRACIE MANSION opens her gallery at 337 E. 10th Street between Avenues A and B (see above).
MIKE BIDLO and DAVID WOJNAROWICZ invite friends to make art in abandoned Pier 34, a fabled cruising spot on the Hudson River in lower Manhattan. By June the Port Authority police have boarded up the structure and begun making arrests.
JUNE
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ (see p. 130) mounts the first in a series of exhibits at Civilian Warfare, featuring his signature images on garbage can lids and supermarket posters.
The NEW YORK TIMES calls the early scene “cozy, downhome and alienated from Establishment art-marketing methods” (Grace Glueck).
TRICIA COLLINS and RICHARD MILAZZO launch Effects. Subtitled Magazine for New Art Theory, the publication enjoys an irregular three-issue run and includes contributions from artists associated with the triumvirate of Conceptually oriented East Village venues—Nature Morte, International With Monument, and C.A.S.H.
JUNE
CLUBS proliferate with the opening of the Sin Club, No Se No, and the Limbo Lounge, the last sponsoring “14 Nights, 14 One-Artist Shows,” in July.
JOHN JESURUN’s “living film serial” Chang in a Void Moon winds up its year-long run at the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge, at 101 Avenue A (see John Hagan on John Jesurun).
JULY
WALTER ROBINSON named art editor of the East Village Eye. During his two-year stint, art writers for the Eye include Carlo McCormick, Yasmin Ramirez-Harwood, Timothy Cohrs, Sylvia Falcon, and Jack Bankowsky.
JOHN SEX sings “Only the Lonely” with his boa constrictor Delilah draped around his torso at the Pyramid.
AUGUST
PATTI ASTOR of the Fun Gallery is featured in People magazine as a visionary who sees valuable art where others see vandalism.
SEPTEMBER
CARLO MCCORMICK’s irreverent column “Art Seen” debuts in the East Village Eye (see Carlo McCormick on Boy in the Hood).
“SOFA/PAINTING” at Gracie Mansion solves the eternal decorating conundrum, as Mike Bidlo, Claudia De Monte, Rodney Alan Greenblat, Rhonda Zwillinger, et al. exhibit paintings with sofas made to match.
C.A.S.H. GALLERY opens at 34 E. 7th Street. In the fall of ’85, artist-proprietors Oliver Wasow and Tom Brazelton move the gallery, renamed Cash/Newhouse, to 170 Avenue B and take on a third partner, artist Karen Sylvester.
RICHARD HAMBLETON’s shadow figures splattered on sides of buildings—doubtless the cause of many a startled double take by bleary home-bound nightclubbers—come in off the streets in concurrent solo shows at Piezo Electric and Civilian Warfare.
OCTOBER
RODNEY ALAN GREENBLAT—whose Alphabet City industry begets ’90s big business in the form of children’s books, toys, and interactive CD-ROMs for the likes of Sony and Minolta—sets up house at Gracie Mansion in his first solo exhibition.
INTERNATIONAL WITH MONUMENT, a three-partner venture of Kent Klamen, Elizabeth Koury, and artist Meyer Vaisman, opens at 111 E. 7th Street (see Dan Cameron on International with Monument).
GALLERY GUIDE gives the East Village its own section and map.
8BCopens on Halloween night at 337 E. 8th Street. Founders Cornelius Conboy and Dennis Gattra create a neighborhood haven for performance art in a unique space: Descending to the basement, the audience looks up through the largely collapsed ground floor, the remainder of which serves as the stage.
SUE COE exhibit opens at P.P.O.W.’s in celebration of the gallery’s opening the previous month.
NOVEMBER
ALPHABET CITY goes to SoHo in Susan Caldwell and Christopher C. Colt’s “Emergence: New from the Lower East Side” at Caldwell’s West Broadway Gallery.
PAT HEARN GALLERY opens at 94 Avenue B (at 6th Street) and creates a niche market for neo-surrealism—works by Philip Taaffe, Peter Schuyff, George Condo, and others.
The “UNDERDOG” show at East 7th Street Gallery, curated by painter Rick Prol, prompts critics to consider an “East Village sensibility.”
PETER SCHUYFF shows his signature Dr. Seuss-ish biomorphs in his gallery debut at Pat Hearn.
DECEMBER
EAST VILLAGE goes abroad with “The Best of the East Village,” at Barbara Farber’s American Graffiti Gallery in Amsterdam.
GRETCHEN BENDER’s “Change Your Art” repackages images from advertisting and art (Haring, Longo, Salle, and others) in multimedia show at Nature Morte.
The number of East Village galleries to open over the course of the decade is up to THIRTY. By year’s end some two dozen new venues, including Sharpe Gallery, Facchetti-Burk, Oggi-Domani, and Tracey Garet–Michael Kohn, are up and running.
JANUARY
HELENE WINER establishes a chronology for the East Village galleries with her show “New Galleries of the Lower East Side,” at Artists Space in Tribeca.
The NYPD’s drug sweep “Operation Pressure Point” puts an additional 200 uniformed and 40 plainclothes police on the streets of the Lower East Side, a telling action re: the changing fortunes of the neighborhood.
The East Village stakes a claim in the ’80s art capital of EUROPE with the group show “East Village,” featuring Mike Bidlo, Bronson Eden, Rodney Alan Greenblat, Kiely Jenkins, Davids West and Wojnarowicz, and Rhonda Zwillinger, and others, at Galerie Anna Friebe in Cologne.
“CLIMBING: THE EAST VILLAGE,” a twenty-five-artist group show curated by Carlo McCormick, opens at Hal Bromm, on lower West Broadway.
FEBRUARY
KENNY SCHARF follows Haring to SoHo with a Tony Shafrazi solo concurrent with his Fun showing.
PIEZO ELECTRIC leaves 29 Clinton Street for 437 E. 6th Street, and Colin de Land’s Vox Populi moves into the vacated space.
MARCH
COLLINS & MILAZZO’s multiartist group shows—“Still Life with Transaction: Former Objects, New Moral Arrangements, and the History of Surfaces,” at International With Monument, and “Civilization and the Landscape of Discontent,” at Nature Morte—open within three days of each other.
APRIL
MIKE BIDLO re-creates Andy Warhol’s Factory in his studio at P.S. 1. (see p. 115), paying fitting tribute to the Pop maestro to whom his replications of contemporary artistic landmarks owe a considerable debt.
The “NOT FOR SALE” committee of PAD/D (Political Art Documentation and Distribution) organizes its second antigentrification event, “Not for Sale/Art for the Evicted: A Project Against Displacement,” opening on the corner of Avenue A and 10th Street. Artists are invited to produce posters in multiples, and PAD/D members paste them in four designated street locations until the supply is exhausted.
JUNE
ART IN AMERICA publishes a lavishly illustrated, twenty-seven-page survey of East Village art, “Slouching Toward Avenue D,” by Walter Robinson and Carlo McCormick, followed by a pithy two-page rebuttal, “The Problem with Puerilism,” in which senior editor Craig Owens undoes the pair’s image of the East Village as a blushing “avant-garde” (see Liza Kirwin on EV in the Press).
JULY
WALTER ROBINSON and Carlo McCormick show Craig Owens the true meaning of puerilism with their “Puerilism” show at Kamikaze.
AUGUST
“AMERICAN SCULPTURE NOW: 25,000 Sculptors from Across the U.S.A.,” at Civilian Warfare, self-mocks the scene’s characteristic inclusiveness.
SEPTEMBER
GREER LANKTON appears nude with two of her sculptures in a full-page Artforum promo (a take-off on Lynda Benglis’s infamous ad a decade earlier) for her second solo at Civilian Warfare (see above).
PHILIP TAAFFE shows his Bridget Riley paintings at Pat Hearn (see above).
Director SUSAN SEIDELMAN (Smithereens [1982]) returns to the East Village to begin shooting Desperately Seeking Susan, starring Madonna and Rosanna Arquette.
MARGUERITE VAN COOK and JAMES ROMBERGER, proprietors of Ground Zero, revisit the ’60s with their “Acid Show” at Sensory Evolution Gallery.
OCTOBER
KEIKO BONK assembles the East Village Orchestra, an extravagant ensemble of sixty-odd instruments, twenty singers, eight dancers, and a handful of “live” painters.
SHERRIE LEVINE’s “1917,” a show of works after Egon Schiele, Kazimir Malevich, and Malevich student Ilya Chasnik, opens at Nature Morte.
The first MUSEUM SURVEY of Alphabet City art, “The East Village Scene,” curated by Janet Kardon, is held at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.
Adding to the SoHo-EV traffic, Barry Blinderman opens SEMAPHORE EAST at 157 Avenue B, an East Village outpost for his West Broadway gallery. Mark Kostabi shows at both venues and all points in between.
NOVEMBER
“NEO YORK: Report on a Phenomenon,” the first West Coast survey of East Village art, opens at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
DECEMBER
COLLINS & MILAZZO curate “The New Capital” at White Columns.
ITALIAN VOGUE poses East Village artists and dealers as fashion trendsetters.
GEORGE CONDO has concurrent shows at Pat Hearn and Barbara Gladstone. Reviewing the exhibitions for Art in America, Gary Indiana notes that “Condo has refined the daffy figurativism indigenous to the New East Village into something on the whole more provocative, more exasperating, and more appealing.”
POSTMASTERS opens at 66 Avenue A. Owner Magdalena Sawon shows work by Aimee Rankin, Perry Hoberman, Wallace & Donohue, and others.
FORTY-SEVEN new gallery openings in 1984 bring the decade’s total to SEVENTY-SEVEN.
JANUARY
PETER NAGY, artist/proprietor of Nature Morte, shows his large-scale black-and-white photocopies-on-canvas of consumer goods and logos at International With Monument.
The NEW YORK TIMES’s Grace Glueck declares the East Village scene “a howling success.”
FEBRUARY
MASSIMO AUDIELLO Gallery opens at 436 E. 11th Street with a show of Donald Traver’s paintings, followed in March by “The Chi-Chi Show,” in which artists make works inspired by Pat Hearn’s chihuahua.
MARCH
STEVEN ADAMS Gallery opens at 504 E. 12th Street with Judy Glantzman’s cut-out portraits of art-world figures.
NICOLAS A. MOUFARREGE shows his Pop needlepoint canvases at Fun. Less than three months later, he dies of AIDS, which will take a heavy toll on the community.
APRIL
NEW YORK TALK features Hope Sandrow’s photograph of the East Village sisterhood of artists and gallerists at a sporadic gathering known as “girls night out.”
MAY
TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS creates a portfolio of seven East Village group shots, titled _The New Irascibles.
_East Villagers make LIFE magazine (in real life) with Todd Brewster’s article “Far Out’s In: Young Artists Paint New York’s East Village Golden.”
ROLAND HAGENBERG produces Eastvillage: A Guide. A Documentary, the first of two “yearbooks” for the scene.
JEFF KOONS shows his basketballs suspended underwater in aquariums at International With Monument, his first solo exhibition.
JUNE
Art critic ROBERT HUGHES dubs the 1985 Whitney Biennial “the worst in living memory,” primarily because of its East Village content. In Time, he writes, “What finds favor here is young, loud and, except in its careerism, invincibly dumb.”
“PAYOLA,” a group show in which artists buy wall space for $20 a square foot, opens at Mike Osterhout’s M¯o David Gallery.
JULY
“INFOTAINMENT,” the Nature Morte and International With Monument manifesto, begins a six-city, two-continent tour in Houston (see David Robbins on ABC TV).
FUN GALLERY, hit with huge shipping bills from the Zurich Art Fair, closes.
SEPTEMBER
PAT HEARN renovates a larger space at 735 E. 9th Street.
JAY GORNEY MODERN ART opens at 204 E. 10th Street with a group show that includes Peter Halley, Alexis Rockman, Peter Schuyff, and Meyer Vaisman.
OCTOBER
CARLO MCCORMICK declares the East Village scene dead, killed by greed, envy, and the popular press (East Village Eye).
8BC closes its doors after more than 1,700 performances.
The East Village racks up more FREQUENT-FLYER MILES as Thomas B. Solomon’s “A Brave New World—A New Generation—40 New York Artists” opens at the Exposition Hall of Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. “Psycho Pueblo,” at Galería Fernando Vijande in Madrid, appears the next month.
NOVEMBER
In a NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE cover story, Maureen Dowd characterizes the scene as “a blue-chip bohemia.”
DECEMBER
PEOPLE magazine calls Gracie Mansion one “the 25 most intriguing people of ’85” (see Kirwin above).
FORTY-SEVEN new East Village galleries, including Dash & Dash, 9th Precinct Gallery, Ground Zero, and Zone, bring the count of spaces opened over the decade to 124.
MARCH
“Is the Party Over?” queries Judd Tully in his NEW ART EXAMINER cover story.
In keeping with their nineteenth-century personae, David MCDERMOTT and PETER MCGOUGH cordially invite guests to their concurrent Massimo Audiello/Pat Hearn shows on “the fifteenth instance of March through the sixth instance of April 1972 [1986].”
APRIL
PETER HALLEY shows his paintings of geometric designs—primarily linked rectangles (or “cells”) in Day-Glo acrylic and Roll-a-Tex—in his second one-person show at International With Monument.
IZHAR PATKIN exhibits “The Black Paintings,” at the Limbo Gallery in collaboration with Holly Solomon.
OCTOBER
NEO-GEO hits SoHo as Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, and Meyer Vaisman exhibit at the Sonnabend Gallery in one of the gallery’s best-attended shows ever (see above).
“CLEGG & GUTTMANN & KOSUTH” opens at Jay Gorney, fortifying the Nature Morte–International With Monument–Cash/Newhouse axis.
NOVEMBER
First solo show of TIM ROLLINS AND K.O.S., or Kids of Survival (Rollins’s high school students from the South Bronx), opens at Jay Gorney Modern Art.
DECEMBER
“Only” THIRTY-TWO new East Village galleries open in 1986. The ’80s total is 156.
MARCH
The EXODUS begins: Wolff Gallery relocates to 560 Broadway, beginning a mass migration from the East Village to SoHo.
APRIL
American Fine Arts, Co. (the renamed Vox Populi) and 303 Gallery jointly exhibit JOHN DOGG. Rampant speculation as to the mysterious artist’s identity follows; Richard Prince, Gary Indiana, Collins & Milazzo, and the directors of the two galleries, Colin de Land and Lisa Spellman, are all suspects.
JUNE
NEW YORK magazine declares the scene dead (Amy Virshup, “The Fun’s Over”).
DECEMBER
ELEVEN new gallery openings in 1987 bring the decade’s total to 167. But closings and moves outnumber new ventures as seven key galleries, including American Fine Arts Co., Jack Shainman, Jay Gorney, and Massimo Audiello, follow Wolff.
JUNE
NATURE MORTE closes. Peter Nagy publishes the gallery’s complete exhibition history in the advertising pages of the summer issues of Artforum and Flash Art.
AUGUST
TOMPKINS SQUARE RIOTS, pitting police against squatters, activists, and bystanders, accentuate the dark side of the neighborhood’s changing fortunes.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT dies of drug overdose at age twenty-seven.
DECEMBER
“THE LAST PICTURE SHOW: Seven Year Itch” opens at Gracie Mansion—her final show in the East Village (at least for the ’80s).
At final count a total of 176 East Village galleries had opened during the ’80s. NINE new galleries set up shop in 1988, even as International With Monument, Sharpe, Pat Hearn, and P.P.O.W. depart for Broadway.
DECEMBER
303, Gracie Mansion and Postmasters join the BROADWAY MIGRATION.
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JANUARY
The East Village subsection is dropped from the GALLERY GUIDE.
