art gallery
An art gallery is a room or a building in which visual art is displayed. In Western cultures from the mid-15th century, a gallery was any long, narrow covered passage along a wall, first used in the sense of a place for art in the 1590s. The lon ...
in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
that exhibited the work of contemporary artists in a loft space that was run collectively by a group of young avant-garde artists.
History
In November 1958, artists
Red Grooms
Red Grooms (born Charles Rogers Grooms on June 7, 1937) is an American multimedia artist best known for his colorful pop-art constructions depicting frenetic scenes of modern urban life. Grooms was given the nickname "Red" by Dominic Falcone ...
and
Jay Milder
Jay Milder (born 1934) is an American artist and a figurative expressionist painter of the second generation New York School.
Themes from the Hebrew Bible such as Jacob's Ladder and Noah’s Ark, and the esoteric mystical beliefs of the Kabbala ...
, founded the City Gallery inside of Grooms' third-floor walk-up inside of a
Flatiron
Flatiron or flat iron may refer to various things, often in the shape of a wedge:
Objects
*Clothes iron
*Hair iron
Places
*Flatiron Building, New York City, at the intersection of 5th & Broadway
**Flatiron District, New York City, named after ...
Loft, which was located at 735
Sixth Avenue
Sixth Avenue – also known as Avenue of the Americas, although this name is seldom used by New Yorkers, p.24 – is a major thoroughfare in New York City's borough of Manhattan, on which traffic runs northbound, or "uptown". It is commercial ...
(the northwest corner of Twenty-Forth street).Judith Stein, "Red Grooms the Early Years (1937-1960)", ''Red Grooms A Retrospective'', (Philadelphia:
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Grooms and Milder were previously part of the Phoenix Gallery, a cooperative art gallery founded during the 10th Street gallery boom. When Phoenix Gallery declined to show
Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg (January 28, 1929 – July 18, 2022) was a Swedish-born American sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions ...
's work, Grooms and Milder dropped out of Phoenix and City Gallery organized Oldenberg's first New York City exhibition.
The City Gallery gallery ceased operations in May 1959 when Grooms left the city for the summer. After Grooms returned to New York in the fall, he moved downtown to Delancey Street and subsequently founded the Delancey Street Museum, which featured many of the same artists exhibited at City Gallery, and also presented some of the first 'Happenings.' The building that housed City Gallery was demolished soon after Grooms moved out.
Exhibitions
In addition to Oldenberg's solo New York debut, City Gallery also presented
Jim Dine
Jim Dine (born June 16, 1935 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is an American artist whose œuvre extends over sixty years. Dine’s work includes painting, drawing, printmaking (in many forms including lithographs, etchings, gravure, intaglio, woodcuts, l ...
's inaugural New York City exhibition. Other artists who showed at City Gallery included Mica Nava (née Michaela Weisselberg), Chris Lane,
Gandy Brodie
Gandy Brodie (May 20, 1924 - October 22, 1975) was an American painter working primarily in New York City and Townshend, Vermont during the middle part of the 20th century. He had ties to Abstract Expressionism through artists such as Willem de ...
,
Sari Dienes
Sari Dienes (8 October 1898 – 25 May 1992) was a Hungarian-born American artist. During a career spanning six decades she worked in a wide range of media, creating paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, textile designs, sets and c ...
,
Jackie Ferrara
Jackie Ferrara (born Jacqueline Hirschhorn on November 17, 1929, in Detroit, Michigan) is an American sculptor and draughtswoman best known for her pyramidal stacked structures. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Los A ...
, Stephen Durkee,
Mimi Gross
Mimi Gross (born 1940) is a New York City born American artist.
Biography Early life
Gross was born in New York City in 1940. She is the daughter of the sculptor Chaim Gross. She grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan among the artist commu ...
Robert Beauchamp
Robert Beauchamp (1923 – 22 March 1995) was an American figurative painter and arts educator. Beauchamp's paintings and drawings are known for depicting dramatic creatures and figures with expressionistic colors. His work was described in the ...
,
George Nelson Preston
George Nelson Preston aka Nana Anakwa, the Aboafohene of Akuapem-Mamfe, Ghana (born 1938), is an artist and scholar of African art, and the author of essays, reviews, and books on traditional African art and Contemporary art. He has participated as ...
, Joan Herbst, Peter Passuntino,
Budd Hopkins
Elliot Budd Hopkins (June 15, 1931 – August 21, 2011) was an American artist, author, and ufologist. He was a prominent figure in alien abduction phenomena and related UFO research.
Life
Elliot Budd Hopkins was born in 1931. He was rai ...
,
Emily Mason
Emily Mason (January 12, 1932 – December 10, 2019) was an American abstract painter and printmaker. Mason developed her individual approach to the Abstract Expressionist and color field painting traditions with her veils of color and spontan ...
,
Wolf Kahn
Wolf Kahn (October 4, 1927 – March 15, 2020) was a German-born American painter.
Kahn, known for his combination of Realism and Color Field, worked in pastel, oil paint, and printmaking. He studied under Hans Hofmann, and also graduated from ...
, and
Alex Katz
Alex Katz (born July 24, 1927) is an American figurative artist known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints.
Early life and career
Alex Katz was born July 24, 1927, to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, as the son of an émigré who ha ...
. Milder and Grooms also exhibited their work in group shows with their peers. In an interview with art historian, Judith Stein, Grooms recalls, "We were reacting to Tenth Street. In '58 and '59, Tenth Street was sort of like
SoHo
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster, part of the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century.
The area was develop ...
is now, and it was getting all the lively attention of everyone downtown....We were just kids in our twenties..and had a flair for attracting people to our openings."