#changing spaces

“I can just picture myself going up in the elevator and into this very small gallery. It had a lot of power, of course—this true New York energy… We all felt like we were a part of something, that we were seriously part of some significant leap forward with art, with theory.” — Senga Nengudi, artist.

Hello, and welcome to In, Not Of, a podcast dedicated to providing short histories of alternative art spaces for Black and Indigenous creatives. Today’s episode focuses on the Just Above Midtown gallery and the recent Changing Spaces exhibition produced by the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Linda Goode Bryant, the visionary behind Just Above Midtown, or JAM, is actually the source of the title of this project, In, Not Of. When JAM was founded, Goode Bryant described it as being intentionally “in, not of the art world.” The gallery was originally located, as the name suggests, just above midtown, only a little ways away from Manhattan’s commercial gallery district. In 1974, when Goode Bryant opened the gallery, the art scene was primarily white and offered few opportunities for artists who fell outside of the norm. Goode Bryant wanted to provide a space for artists of color to experiment and exhibit their work, and that space became the gallery and laboratory we are discussing today.

JAM faced a number of challenges and obstacles from the very beginning. Beyond the general sentiments of the art world at the time, within the Black community there was a strong divide between representational and non-representational artists. This division rose to prominence in the 1960s alongside the question, “what is Black art”? What followed was a debate about defining a Black aesthetic, and the responsibilities of Black artists to their communities. Some people believed that art needed to provide recognizable messages of a political and culturally-specific nature, which abstract art, in their minds, invariably failed to do. Others were more interested in abstraction and tended to define Black art simply as art made by Black people. The debate existed across coasts, with no sense of national unity. Goode Bryant was interested in providing opportunities to artists from all over the country, regardless of the inevitable butting of heads that would result from that decision.

An early instance of backlash occurred at a solo show for David Hammons in May of 1975. Hammons was already somewhat established in California, where he had begun making a series of “Body Prints,” in which he covered his skin, clothes, and other materials in various forms of grease, made outlines on large white sheets of paper by pressing himself into them, and then covered the grease in powdered pigments. This work is what initially caught Linda Goode Bryant’s eye for JAM, but Hammons had a different display in mind at the gallery. He created sculptures out of non-traditional materials such as greasy paper bags, barbecue bones, and clippings of hair he’d gotten from barber shops. On opening night, there was so much outrage that Bryant took the opportunity to stage an impromptu debate about what kind of materials were acceptable to use in one’s art, finally bringing the audience to the conclusion that, while different from his previous work, the Hammons show still had merit. And since many people, Goode Bryant herself included, were still interested in that previous work, another opportunity presented itself: JAM hosted a print-in workshop in which visitors to the gallery were able to make their own body prints alongside Hammons.

Outside of traditional art shows, JAM’s programming included many types of workshops and other forms of community engagement. One of Goode Bryant’s initial concerns was establishing an infrastructure for Black collectors to engage with artists in order to bolster the community and provide support for the art that was being made. It became clear to her that selling art was about relationships, and so JAM needed to bring people together—this led to the establishment of the Brunch with JAM program, which was a series of lunch-time talks by members of the art world from curators to historians to critics. JAM provided cheap, homemade meals to accompany the series.

In 1980, Just Above Midtown moved from its Fifty-Seventh Street location to a warehouse in Tribeca, providing the gallery with significantly more space than before, which Goode Bryant intended to make full use of. From its very beginning, JAM was a place where Black artists could display their work, not in isolation but alongside their white counterparts. Goode Bryant was looking to explore this concept more, in order to let audiences decide for themselves if there was a real difference in the quality of the works. Of course, the choice to move to Tribeca was not just about including more white artists, but also about bringing the gallery further downtown in order to interact with other experimental artists, and now that they had more space they could also explore various modes of performance art and media that were previously inaccessible.

However, complaints from neighbors about late night events led to JAM having to relocate once again, this time to SoHo in 1984. This was to be the final iteration of Just Above Midtown. At the beginning of this episode, I referred to JAM as not only a gallery, but a laboratory. Goode Bryant herself described the project that way, and one of her goals for the new location was to provide a space for artists to work without the pressures or responsibilities of exhibiting and selling works in a commercial setting. Alongside that conceit, Goode Bryant also wanted to offer opportunities for the incorporation of new technologies in film and sound. As Kellie Jones writes, by the time JAM made its final relocation, “the curatorial process was no longer memorialized in objects but contained in living possibilities that held out ‘an alternative or corrective to the failures of mainstream institutions and ideologies.’”

The original intentions of JAM had evolved and shifted over the years, moving away from involving the Black community in standard consumerist art practices and instead towards a reshaping of the art world’s entire infrastructure. On this level, and on a more practical financial level, Just Above Midtown was not designed to be a permanent space—in many ways, this was a known impossibility, particularly because much of the project was financed with credit card debt that Goode Bryant herself incurred. By 1986, JAM had gotten into hot water with multiple landlords and the IRS, and it was no longer tenable to maintain the space. JAM closed its doors in SoHo in August, but several interdisciplinary projects continued around New York with the support of the staff up until 1989.

Though JAM no longer exists, many of the artists involved in its programming continue to make work today, making use of the creative and professional connections that were forged. Goode Bryant has pursued a number of projects across a variety of media, including her 2003 documentary project, Flag Wars, which explores conflicts around gentrification in a neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio.

More recently, Goode Bryant is the visionary force behind Project EATS, which she founded in 2009. The project has established several neighborhood-based farms in New York, which provide places for community programming, food pantries, farm stands, and even, in one location, prepared food. Alongside the farm sites, Project EATS runs the Art Inside/Out program, which is a series of artist commissions that aims to bring art outside of the museum and into local communities. The program works with several artists who exhibited at JAM, incorporating their art into installations at their farms and creating a spiritual successor to the boundary-pushing work of Just Above Midtown.

Senga Nengudi reflected back on her time at JAM, saying: “It’s sort of like when you throw a rock into a pond and it ripples outward in concentric circles, that’s how JAM was. It just kept expanding from the center, which was Linda. It kept expanding and getting larger and more beautiful.”

The most recent iteration of Just Above Midtown occurred earlier this year in the form of the Changing Spaces exhibition which ran from October 9, 2022, to February 18, 2023 at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition was a collaboration between MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem, whose current Director and Chief Curator, Thelma Golden, alongside many others, put together a beautiful tribute and re-imagining of the gallery.

Representing JAM at MoMA was certainly a challenge, but one that the organizers successfully met. Reviews of the exhibition were overwhelmingly positive, with visitors remarking on how well curators were able to lay out the different eras of JAM and represent the vast variety of visual art, performances, and collaborations that occurred thanks to the art workers involved with the gallery. Goode Bryant’s record-keeping proved to be essential to the exhibition, as a wall of receipts and messages demonstrated the financial difficulties that faced JAM throughout the gallery’s existence, making clear to audiences the individual work and mutual aid that went into keeping JAM afloat.

The presentation of Just Above Midtown at the Museum of Modern Art was successful not only because of the support the exhibition received, but because so many of the people who were involved with JAM and Goode Bryant are still invested in the cause: MoMA’s exhibition therefore is a celebration of the foundational work Goode Bryant and so many others did in order to make space for artists of color within the art world. While there are obviously still many obstacles facing Black artists today, the Changing Spaces exhibition provides hope by showing that though JAM’s doors may be long closed, the spirit of the gallery lives on.

The information from this episode comes in large part from the exhibition catalog for Changing Spaces, as well as the Museum of Modern Art’s digital record. These sources and accompanying images can be found linked on the podcast’s page.