#julianpretto

The year 2014 marked the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the restaurant Nobu New York at 105 Hudson Street in Tribeca, featuring Japanese cuisine created by Chef Nobu Matsuhisa. After meeting him in Los Angeles, the actor, director, and producer Robert De Niro was motivated to bring Chef Nobu and his culinary artistry to New York City in 1994, to open his original, flagship location in downtown Manhattan. The restaurant was a prominent establishment on the corner of Hudson and Franklin streets and occupied the ground floor of an impressive, eleven story Beaux-Arts building, ensconced in marble on the exterior of the first and second floors, in terra cotta on the upper floors, and lavishly decorated with Renaissance Revival columns and window adornments. While Nobu New York served as a hive for actors, musicians and socialites like Madonna, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Tom Hanks and Kate Winslet downstairs, paying an average of $93 per person for their meals, the upper floors were filled with luxury loft apartments selling for as much as $5.5 million. Though the economics had escalated dramatically, the building at 105 Hudson Street had a long and rich history of fostering the intermingling of artists from many disciplines, most significantly during the 1970s when the building became known for a brief time as the Fine Arts Building.

The Fine Arts Building (FAB) was previously referred to as the Pierce building and the Powell building.[1] It was originally designed in 1892 by Carrère & Hastings, the architects of the main branch of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, built between 1902-1911, and the mansion which houses the Frick Collection on 70th Street and Fifth Avenue, built for industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1913. The building was designed for a Boston-based chocolatier, the Baker Chocolate Company, which was run by Henry Pierce. Built as a seven-story building, the chocolate company operated on the lower floors and the upper floors were leased to other food companies. In 1903 the building was purchased by candy manufacturer Alexander Powell, who subsequently added four stories, as well as huge bronze letters deeming it the “Powell Building.”[2] 

[Postcard featuring the New York Public Library ca. 1920; the building was designed by the architects of the Fine Arts Building.]

The neighborhood was referred to then as Washington Market and contained New York’s main food market, out of which hundreds of wholesale food vendors operated. The area was filled with warehouses and factories due to its convenience to the Hudson River piers and rail transportation and was described in The New York Times in 1872 as a “dirty, degraded little rat hole.”[3] Nearly a century later in 1967, the city moved the vendors of Washington Market to the new Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, literally paving the way for the construction of the World Trade Center between the years 1966-1977, and making way for a dramatic change to the area.[4] The desertion of the food industry from the neighborhood and the influx of office space created by the twin towers left an abundance of unoccupied warehouse buildings and loft spaces. In 1974 the Fine Arts Building, though not yet carrying this moniker, was 50 percent vacant.[5]

[Engraving showing Washington Market in 1888, with dozens of horse-drawn produce carts ready to unload; The market’s closing in 1967 paved the way for changes in Tribeca. (published in Harper's Weekly Dec. 1888).]

Leonard Julian Pretto (known as Julian), arrived in New York City in 1968 after majoring in Art History at the University of Illinois with a specialization in architecture.[6] Pretto assisted at numerous galleries including Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago and Richard L. Feigen in New York, and was active in setting up and managing the New York gallery space for Turin-based art dealer Gian Enzo Sperone.[7] While in New York, Pretto began dabbling in real estate and combining that activity with his interest in art by capitalizing on underutilized real estate as a space for temporary exhibitions.[8] In some instances, he managed an entire building in exchange for free living space for himself, as was the case with 10 Beach Street, near the current intersection of Walker and Varick streets in Tribeca. Pretto saw the building and felt strongly that he would like to live in it.[9] He proposed this to the owner, then worked to fill all five floors with paying tenants, eventually leading to the building’s profitable sale.[10] Gallerist Hal Bromm, who acquired a loft for himself at 10 Beach Street through his friendship with Pretto, recalled,

That is what Julian did all the time. He loved to do that. He would go to real estate owners and say, ‘you have an empty space, why don’t you let me do an exhibition here?’ Today we would call it a pop-up gallery, but that word did not exist back then. He would…say, ‘your space is empty and it is for rent. It will help you if I put an art show in this space.’ And most of the time they had nothing to lose. So Julian would have at his disposal an empty ground floor loft to put an art show in. And he did shows like that over and over and over.[11]

[Julian Pretto and Susan Penzner at the opening of Self-Portraits at the Fine Arts Building in 1975 (detail of photograph by Marcia Resnick, published on 98bowery.com).]

Pretto pursued this dualistic path of art and real estate throughout his career. An exhibition focused on Pretto’s legacy at MINUS SPACE gallery in Dumbo, Brooklyn in 2013 said in its press release,

Renowned for his sophisticated eye, keen ability to recognize new talent, and uncommon generosity, Pretto was beloved by the artists he exhibited and widely-respected in the greater contemporary art world. During his 30-year career, Pretto presented the work of well over 100 artists spanning multiple generations, strategies, and styles at an array of small, often temporary alternative gallery spaces in Manhattan’s Tribeca, Soho, and West Village neighborhoods.[12]

In addition to pop-up exhibitions, Pretto ran multiple galleries of his own in downtown locations including a three-story gallery in a former speakeasy at 176 Franklin Street during the late 1970s, and at locations including 103 Sullivan Street, 50 and 54 MacDougal, 251 6th Avenue, 69 Wooster, and 142 Greene Street during the late 1980s-early 1990s.[13] The New York Times said Pretto was “sometimes known as TriBeCa’s Heiner Friedrich,” an acknowledgment of his significant impact on the art world and the neighborhood.[14]

During the mid-1970s however, the City Planning Commission had only just begun referring to the “Triangle Below Canal Street” as “TriBeCa,” and the name did not immediately catch on among residents, who continued to call it Washington Market or a variety of other designations including “Lo Cal,” “the Lower West Side,” or even “SoSo (for South of Soho).”[15] Regardless of its name or the fact that it was shaped more like a trapezoid than a triangle, the neighborhood was becoming attractive to artists who were migrating from SoHo, its predecessor as artists’ enclave, which was becoming over-run with boutiques, restaurants and crowds.[16] Pretto was quoted in The New York Times envisioning the neighborhood’s future as an “international art center” stating,

TriBeCa is really where SoHo was in the late 1960s, when things were not so chic…the people here [in Tribeca] are resisting the fast changes that come with fashion, because they drive up rents.[17]

Pretto found the Beaux-Arts building at 105 Hudson Street very appealing and extremely attractive architecturally.[18] In 1974, as its food-importer tenants were gradually leaving, Pretto convinced the owner, who had been trying to sell the building, that he could run it at a profit by filling it with commercial and short-term residential tenants, including artists and art-related businesses (i.e. art framers, art movers, etc.).[19]  Pretto rented the lower floors out as “non-living” artist studios, galleries and office spaces for a yearly fee of $4 per square foot, or roughly $90 per month.[20] He renamed the building the Fine Arts Building and began inviting artists, critics and others to organize free shows and performances in the building’s spacious, unoccupied rooms on the upper floors.[21] He himself ran a commercial gallery called Julian Pretto Gallery on the fifth floor, as well as overseeing what functioned as a nonprofit space on the ninth floor, called the Fine Arts Building Gallery.[22] Pretto used the income from renting out the studio and office space to both finance the nonprofit gallery and to cover the building’s expenses.[23] Assisting him in the administration of the building were four unpaid staffers, working in exchange for free studio space.[24]

Alternative spaces for artistic production and exhibition proliferated wildly in New York City during the decade of the 1970s, though what has been deemed the “alternative space movement” is generally considered to have begun to emerge in the late 1960s. Important precursors can also be found in the 1950s, if you consider the cooperative galleries on Tenth and Twelfth Streets in Greenwich Village and the gathering of Abstract Expressionists and “public lectures, screenings, and poetry readings” held at the Eighth Street Club (or “The Club”) in those years.[25] Fluxus artists, including George Maciunas, also served to advance the notion of cooperative living and combined living and working spaces, called Fluxhouses, in the early 1960s. The phenomenon of alternative art spaces for artists continues today and has been described by the artist and writer Jacki Apple as “a series of cycles in which each generation declares its independence from market-based institutions.”[26]

An aversion to the commercialization of art was certainly true of many of the spaces which arose in the 1970s, though politics and changing aesthetics and form in art-making also drove the need for their formation. One theory for the eruption of such spaces in the 1970s, which came “at the end of an economic boom, when protests over the Vietnam war were shaking the art community and disrupting international exhibitions (such as Documenta and the Venice Biennale),” is that they arose out of a consciousness that had developed among artists that “individuals acting in concert could actually have an impact on ‘the system.’”[27] The “art system” needed overhauling in many ways—in order to address the inordinately dominant power structures surrounding the exhibition of art and the lack of equilibrium across gender and race, as well as to accommodate the expression of diverse political beliefs. Separately, collaboration, experimentation in new art forms, and the abandonment of traditionally established medium-specific categories generated new clusters of activity thereby necessitating new outlets. Alternative spaces responded to and effectively served the needs of artists, both in terms of their politics and their artistic practice. In a 1977 article on the subject, the critic Kay Larson anticipated the impact alternative spaces would have, in that they “will undoubtedly bring changes: changes in local communities exposed to experimental art, changes in esthetics (the cross-fertilization of ideas), [and] changes in the distribution of power within the art showing system.”[28]

The history of more than 130 alternative projects, programs and spaces active in New York City since 1960 was covered extensively in Lauren Rosati and Mary Anne Staniszewski’s 2012 publication_ Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960 to 2010_, and in the corresponding exhibition held at the cultural center Exit Art in 2010.[29] Many lasting institutions founded during the 1970s are featured in the catalogue, such as 112 Workshop—which became 112 Greene Street and now White Columns (1970), The Kitchen (1971), Artists Space (1972), the Clocktower Gallery (1972), Franklin Furnace (1976), Printed Matter (1976), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center—now The Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 (1976), and The Drawing Center (1977). While the Fine Arts Building is mentioned in relation to organizations which operated within its walls for a time (i.e. Artists Space), it is appropriately not included as one of the featured programs in the book which tend to be singular organizations with relatively focused missions and administration, and in some cases operating with government funding.

[Facade of downtown alternative art space, 112 Workshop, on Greene Street in Soho ca. 1970 (published with the essay “Alternate Realities” on daviddeitcher.com).]

[Exterior of alternative space, Franklin Furnace, at 112 Franklin Street in Tribeca, 1978, featuring an installation by artist Dara Birnbaum (photograph by Jacki Apple; courtesy of Franklin Furnace).]

[Exterior of alternative space, the Clocktower Gallery (© Clocktower Productions)]

[Exterior of The Kitchen’s third and current space in Chelsea after operating in Soho from 1973-1986 and before that in Greenwich Village from 1971-1973 (photograph published on the Kitchen.org).]

[Cover of Artforum magazine in October 1976 featuring the alternative art space P.S.1’s inaugural exhibition, Rooms, which included many artists who also exhibited at the Fine Arts Building (image ©Artforum).

Brian O’Doherty, critic, artist, and head of the visual arts section of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) during the 1970s, is credited by many with establishing the very expression “alternative space.”[30] The NEA was founded by the Federal government in 1965 and though their contribution to the arts started minimally, the organization grew to become a key funding source for arts and cultural institutions. By 1977, NEA contributions to the arts had grown to over $100 million per year, with $3.5 million of that going to visual arts.[31] The non-profit institution Artists Space was reported to have come into existence (by way of the Committee for the Visual Arts) in 1972 “precisely because money was available,” though it also had a solid mission and well-executed program in support of young, emerging artists.[32] Government funding allowed many organizations such as Artists Space, to “detach themselves from the commercial gallery network and eliminate buying and selling from artshowing.”[33] Most alternative art spaces were less interested in selling work like commercial galleries or in assembling permanent collections like museums, but instead functioned like service organizations for artists.[34] They were described as “neutral, non-judgemental, non-authenticating, openly experimental and sympathetic” spaces for new ideas, unconcerned with salability and operating without the pressure of museum trustees with corporate connections.[35] They were also very commonly artist-run from the top-down, in terms of directors and/or board members, and employed democratic decision-making processes as compared to museums.[36] The Fine Arts Building was similar to and a part of the alternative space movement that exploded during the 1970s in that it provided an open space for artistic experimentation, however it remains separate based on at least one key distinction—it was not a singular organization with a unified mission and administration, but simply an architectural structure and environment in which many varied and separate entities—artists, writers, musicians, performers, guest curators, and commercial and non-profit organizations—co-habitated and interacted in a fluid, unregulated, and continually evolving way.

Though Pretto capitalized on the neighborhood’s economic situation in terms of free real estate, he passed up opportunities to obtain government money for his venture, saying at the time that he rejected “the scrutiny that public funding brings, and the necessity to account for every step.”[37] Pretto asserted that his non-profit gallery within the Fine Arts Building, the Fine Arts Building Gallery, “has no formal existence. It is a nonprofit hobby, philanthropy.”[38] The journalist Phil Patton observed in 1977 that, “alternative spaces began with the notion of delivering space into the hands of artists, but the economic facts of life…dramatically shaped their subsequent evolution.”[39] The sheer existence of administrative oversight and funding runs somewhat counter to the avant-garde spirit behind many alternative programs and perhaps brings them closer to museum and commercial gallery models. Critic Jerry Saltz voiced that concern in 1977 when he said,

Webster defines ‘alternative’ as ‘a choice between one or the other.’ It’s not both. In other words, a space that begins to develop the characteristics of other institutions is no longer an alternative. It is that which it now resembles. [40]

Without such hindrances, the Fine Arts Building operated freely as a governless support structure for the microcosm of diverse, experimental projects, events and art forms that arose and operated within its walls.

A “free-spirited atmosphere reigned” in the Fine Arts Building and it “fostered the camaraderie and networking that helped nourish radical new directions” in art.[41] Artist, historian, curator and journalist Marc H. Miller’s work was included in two exhibitions at the Fine Arts Building, and his website 98 Bowery: 1969-1989, View from the Top Floor has existed as the primary source of information on the building, as well as a source on the downtown New York scene. Miller recalls that “hand-drawn flyers advertising cheap rents” were used to fill the building with “creative types” and “on Saturdays the building bustled with openings and parties, and its halls were filled with artists, writers, and musicians.”[42] In addition to the visual arts, guest performances featured artists across all disciplines, such as Tony Ingrassia of the Ridiculous Theater Company, cabaret performer Lil Picard, and composer, singer, filmmaker, choreographer, and director Meredith Monk.[43] A number of avant-garde theater companies, including the Ridiculous Theater Company, the Performance Group and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, maintained offices in the Fine Arts Building.[44]

[Artists John Cage and Marc H. Miller in an artwork which was exhibited at the Fine Arts Building; Miller’s website 98bowery.com is a primary source of information on the FAB and the downtown arts scene (artwork © Marc H. Miller).]

[Artist, writer and legend Lil Picard and artist/bookdealer Ira Joel Haber; Picard appeared in the Fine Arts Building (image published on Haber’s blog on the occasion of the exhibition Lil Picard and Counterculture New York at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU in 2010).]

[Meredith Monk in “Education of Girl Child,” 1973; Monk appeared at the Fine Arts Building (image published on Duke University’s blog, The Thread, in 2012).]

Many well-known artists and players in the downtown art scene had studio or office space in the building, including “intense and cryptic” performance artist Ralston Farina and artist, critic, and administrator Joe Lewis, prior to his co-founding the art space Fashion Moda with Stefan Eins in the South Bronx in 1978.[45] Lewis was also associated with the artists group Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab) and has since lectured extensively on public art, community-based art making and the alternative space movement.[46] Though many published accounts refer to the studio spaces in the Fine Arts Building as “non-living,” anecdotal evidence supports that some artists were in fact living in their studios. David Ebony, now Managing Editor of Art in America magazine, reportedly “ran a gallery out of his live-in studio” and “hosted memorable performances such as [artist] Robin Winters washing the feet of visitors.”[47] Other commercial galleries in the building included “Ellen Sragow, Photo Works, and Marina Urbach’s C Space, which specialized in European And South American artists.”[48] Pretto at one point planned to convert six spaces into apartments for foreign art dealers who were visiting New York.[49] While there is no confirmation he set up the apartments, Pretto did successfully invite European dealers to bring work to the Fine Arts Building Gallery. He chose “galleries which had themselves shown young American artists in Europe” including Konrad Fischer (Düsseldorf), Nicholas Logsdail’s Lisson Gallery (London), Yvon Lambert (Paris) and Ugo Ferranti (Rome).[50] He was quoted at the time alluding to the need for “more flavor from Europe.”[51] One floor of the building reportedly had “a crash pad for assorted youth and European travelers” and “the basement became a rehearsal space for rock groups like the Erasers who lived in the building.”[52]

[Ralston Farina during a performance; Farina had a studio in the Fine Arts Building and was included in numerous exhibitions in the building (photograph reproduced in an undated press release from Art Performances Inc., accessed in The Museum of Modern Art Library Performance Artists Files). ]

[Joe Lewis (who had a studio in the Fine Arts Building) in a performance at 5 Bleecker Street as a part of the exhibition Income and Wealth, 1979 (Photo courtesy of Coleen Fitzgibbon, published on Hyperallergic.com).]

[Robin Winters (who performed at the Fine Arts Building) in his studio at 591 Broadway in 1983 (photo by Peter Bellamy, published in Bomb Magazine, Fall 1983).]

[Exhibition announcement for Galerie Yvon Lambert, one of the European galleries Pretto invited to hold an exhibition at the Fine Arts Building in 1976 (original accessed at The Museum of Modern Art Library).]

[The Erasers (who rehearsed and lived in the Fine Arts Building) and Bettie Ringma (who exhibited there) pictured at CBGBs (published on 98bowery.com).]

As he had done with the building’s owner and some staffers at the Fine Arts Building, Pretto occasionally employed a barter model with artists. Conceptual artist Roberta Allen recalls that she traded one of her works with Pretto in exchange for her studio space in the Fine Arts Building, which she used to prepare for her 1977 solo exhibition at John Weber gallery.[53] The painter and printmaker Ellen Lanyon, who knew Pretto from Chicago, recalls bumping into him on the street while visiting New York and explaining that she needed a space to rent cheaply in order to meet with dealers while she was in town. Pretto immediately took her to the Fine Arts Building and set her up with a lease on office space in one of the upper floors. Pretto was himself living in a space on one of the lower floors at the time. Lanyon eventually shared her office with three or four other women from Chicago who used it on the same basis that she did, and occasionally she stored the works of her husband, abstract artist Roland Ginzel, there when he had shows in New York.

[Roberta Allen (who had studio space in the FAB while preparing for her 1977 exhibition at John Weber Gallery) in a work titled Pointless Acts #5, 1976 (Courtesy of MINUS SPACE Gallery, © Roberta Allen).]    

[Ellen Lanyon (who had office space in the FAB) in an undated photograph (Image published on Romanovgrave.com with a collection of memories posted by friends of Lanyon following her passing in 2013).]

The Fine Arts Building has a “u-shaped” footprint, creating a lightwell on the back side to allow more light into the building. From her office space and through the lightwell, Lanyon was able to see the artist Robert Morris in a huge space on the other side of the building “casting plaster and doing all kinds of stuff.” She also remembers that the artist John Baldessari had an office down the hall from hers. Lanyon has described a general sense she had of the importance of both the people and activity in the space. In recalling the Fine Arts Building, Lanyon said, “that building, that was the beginning, the heart of Tribeca, the moment.”[54]

[Flyer for 1977 John Baldessari exhibition in the  Fine Arts Building (original accessed in The Museum of Modern Art Library).]

The first exhibitions held in the Fine Arts Building were group shows organized by young, guest curators recruited by Pretto, beginning as early as the summer of 1974. He said he wanted to “help put the building on the map and keep myself in the art business.” These shows were not held within the spaces of established organizations in the building, but in empty spaces used temporarily for each exhibition. Lanyon has said of Pretto, “In my mind, he was the inventor of the pop-up gallery.” One of the early exhibitions in November 1975, called Not Photography, was organized by Edit DeAk, editor of Art-Rite magazine and previously an assistant at Artists Space. The show included forty artists in total, such as Hannah Wilke, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Christo, all “whose medium is not photography but whose pieces in this show used photography, or the technology of it, in some way.” The next big exhibition, Self-Portraits, featured nearly fifty artists and was put together by Susan Penzner, “who ran a gallery out of her uptown apartment, sold advertisements for Artforum, and was a hostess at the popular art hangout One Fifth Avenue.” A third exhibition that fall of 1975, called Lives, was curated by Jeffrey Deitch, then a twenty-two year old assistant at John Weber Gallery, and subsequently an art advisor, dealer, gallery owner and most recently director at the Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art for three years. Deitch alluded in 1975 to the experimental freedom at the Fine Arts Building stating, “This is permitting the kinds of shows that should be in the Museum of Modern Art. But they can’t do shows without the accompanying scholarly rigor. We can.”

[Edit DeAk, curator of Not Photography at the FAB (photo by Marcia Resnick, published on 98bowery.com).]

[Handwritten exhibition announcement for 1975 Self Portraits exhibition at the FAB (original copy accessed in The Museum of Modern Art Library). ]

[From left to right: Susan Penzner, curator of Self Portraits, artist Marcia Resnick, and Jeffrey Deitch, curator of Lives at the opening of Self-Portraits in the FAB, 1975 (photo by Marcia Resnick, published on 98bowery.com).]

The Fine Arts Building allowed for the exhibition of experimental work by large groups of artists as it was being made, without being bogged down or filtered by intellectual critique. The critic Annette Kuhn said, “It is exciting to have large shows put on by the best of the under-30 thinkers. This place has been needed for a long time.” The building continued to gain a reputation as an outlet for exciting curatorial projects. The critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss even curated an exhibition in the building called New Sculpture Plans and Projects during the summer of 1976. By then, the Village Voice called the Fine Arts Building “a ‘must-see’ for the entire season” and called Pretto an “impresario of the more adventurous art shows of the season.” Though Kuhn described one Fine Arts Building exhibition as a “hole-in-the wall venture,” citing “cheap wine,” “some misinstallations,” and “ill-equipped lofts,” she noted that the scene invoked “a strong conviction that history is being made.” She went further to affirm, “which it is.”

A number of lasting institutions occupied spaces in the Fine Arts Building, including Printed Matter, Artists Space and the New Museum, as well as others which are not still in operation, such as Art Information Distribution, which published slide lectures on 1970s art, radical film, recent painting and video art in the mid-1970s. Printed Matter opened a store selling artists books in the Fine Arts Building in 1977. The organization had begun to form the previous year “by a group of like-minded artists and arts administrators (including Carl Andre, Edit DeAk, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Walter Robinson, Pat Steir, Mimi Wheeler, Robin White and Irene von Zahn).” Printed Matter, Inc. is now “the world’s largest nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion, appreciation, and distribution of artists’ publications.”

[Notice of address for The New Museum in the Fine Arts Building (photo published on 98bowery.com).]

The New Museum was founded by Marcia Tucker in early January 1977. Upon being fired from her role as Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art in December, Tucker rented a tiny space in the Fine Arts Building, enlisted a small volunteer staff and one lawyer as an advisor, in order to conceive and establish a new museum devoted to contemporary art. She wanted to create an institution with a “collaborative structure, something that’s fair, something that is not inherently sexist, racist, homophobic.” Though she recalls three people sharing one desk and has described their time at the Fine Arts Building as “using plastic spoons to build a castle,” she also believes that the institution’s success lay on the fact that it started as a small operation, which (in contrast with an established museum such as the Whitney) allowed them to be “fiercely independent.” While Tucker searched for a permanent exhibition space outside the Fine Arts Building, they “began visiting artists in their studios, setting up resource files of information about contemporary artists and their work, and organizing exhibitions.”

[(right) Marcia Tucker, Founding Director of the New Museum (which she founded in a small two-room office space in the Fine Arts Building) ca. 1973-75; (left) Memory (an exhibition organized while at the FAB and held off site at C Space), 1977]

Artists Space was formed in 1972 by critic Irving Sandler and arts administrator Trudie Grace to support emerging and under-recognized artists. In addition to hosting exhibitions, they created the Unaffiliated Artists Slide File, making the work of young New York artists accessible to curators, collectors and gallery personnel; the Independent Exhibition Program, providing funding to artists for public exhibitions; the Visiting Artists Program, providing an honorarium for artists’ speaking engagements; and an Emergency Materials Fund, providing small grants to artists who have been invited to show in non-profit institutions. After residing at 155 Wooster since inception, Artists Space lost its lease and moved to the Fine Arts Building in December 1976. They took over much of the second floor and had the longest tenure of any arts organization in the building as well as the most prolific program of exhibitions, performances, film screenings, and public events.

One seminal Artists Space exhibition held in the Fine Arts Building was Douglas Crimp’s Pictures exhibition in 1977. The exhibition addressed the pervasive use of art forms that were directly concerned with representation including, as Crimp stated in his catalogue, “film and photography, most particularly—and even to the most debased of our cultural conventions—television and picture newspapers.” The exhibition’s lasting importance is evidenced in its continual revisitation, including by Crimp himself, who published a revised version of his catalogue essay in the journal October in 1979, by Artists Space which re-hung the exhibition in 2001, and by Douglas Eklund, photography curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who expanded the concept in 2009 to what he titled The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, including a total of thirty artists compared to Crimp’s original five.

[Installation view of Douglas Crimp’s Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in the Fine Arts Building, 1977 (photo: D. James Dee, published on artistspace.org).]    

[Installation view of Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in the Fine Arts Building, 1977 (photo: D. James Dee, published on artistspace.org).]

[Opening reception of Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in the Fine Arts Building, 1977; Maureen McFadden of National Distillers and Chemical Corporation (sponsor), (left),Founder Irving Sandler (middle), Director Helene Winer (right) (photo published on artistsspace.org).]

[Opening reception of Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in the Fine Arts Building, September 23, 1977 (photo published on artistsspace.org).]

Beyond hosting intellectually rigorous exhibitions with lasting historical significance, Artists Space consistently broke the mold with performance, film, video and audio art exhibitions while in the Fine Arts Building, as well as dipping their toe into hosting Punk/New Wave shows typically found at seedy dives like CBGBs on the Bowery or at the Kitchen, a nonprofit space for video, performance and experimental music. In May of 1978, ten New Wave bands performed during a week-long festival in the Fine Arts Building. Bands included James Chance and the Contortions, Daily Life, DNA, the Gynecologists, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Terminal, The Communists, Theoretical Girls and Tone Death. It was remarked that the “weighty aesthetic issues” typically tackled at Artists Space, “almost overshadowed the urge to boogie,” but not quite. Experimental musician Brian Eno is said to have “looked on from the front” during the Contortions, while Chance “put on an incredible display of punk rock outrageousness, plunging into the audience repeatedly, picking fights along the way” and Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks “left the field in shambles with a set of gem-hard brilliance.” The Soho Weekly News stated the obvious in pointing out that the bands’ “avant-garde aspirations limit their audience and make it impossible for them even to consider playing a place like the Palladium” but that was the intention. Their indifference to the mainstream and their dedication to experimentation is what found them to be right at home in the Fine Arts Building.

[Flyer for week-long festival of New Wave bands at Artists Space in the Fine Arts Building, 1978 (photo published on 98bowery.com).]

[James Chance and the Contortions, at CBGBs, 1978 (photo by Eugene Merinov).]

[James Chance and the Contortions, at CBGBs, 1978 (photo by Eugene Merinov).]

[Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (photo published on NRGM, Finnish independent music magazine’s website).]

[Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, June 17, 1979, Gordon Stevenson, Bradley Fields and Lydia Lunch; the band also performed at the Fine Arts Building (photo published on photographer Tom Warren’s website)]

[Artwork titled “Lydia Lunch, Delancey Street Loft, 1978,” by Godlis which was exhibited in “No Wave,” at KS Art; Lunch performed at the Fine Arts Building the same year this photo was taken (artwork © Godlis, photo published by the New Yorker).]     

The Fine Arts Building was a place where anything could happen. The building fostered interdisciplinarity and multimedia art practice. It provided a fluid, shifting and collaborative environment where artists, artworks and curators fluctuated in an open-ended manner. There were no boundaries in terms of media or practice within its walls. The Fine Arts Building was both a product of, and facilitated a number of historic changes to the art world in the 1970s—the disappearance of hierarchies among fine art media, the emergence of video, film and performance, and the acknowledgement of imbalance across gender, race and other social and political differences.

What follows are three disparate chapters, each an in-depth exploration of a key exhibition from a different year during the Fine Arts Building’s reign as hub of an energetic art scene between 1974-1978. Individually, each exhibition demonstrates the fluidity between media, between disciplines and between art and life that was emblematic of the 1970s, as well as active within the Fine Arts Building. Each chapter provides a window into the plurality of art forms percolating at the time. Special focus has been given to interdisciplinary and intermedia tendencies found within the artists’ individual practices and artworks, and to the blurring of boundaries between individual media and between personal life and artistic practice.

Footnotes below