Ground Zero Gallery was an art gallery formed in the East Village of

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

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 ...

in mid-1983 as a vehicle for the partnership of artist

James Romberger James Romberger (born 1958) is an American fine artist and cartoonist known for his depictions of New York City's Lower East Side. Romberger's pastel drawings of the ravaged landscape of the Lower East Side and its citizens are in many public ...

and his co-founder

Marguerite Van Cook Marguerite Van Cook (née Martin) (born 1954) is an English artist, writer, musician/singer and filmmaker. She was born in Portsmouth, England and now resides in New York City on the Lower East Side, in the East Village. She attended Portsmouth ...

. In 1984, the gallery found its first physical home on East 11th Street and showed the work of many East Village artists who went on to gain national recognition. It was an early proponent of

installation art Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called ...

. Ground Zero was the production name for many projects in various media undertaken by the team of Van Cook and Romberger prior to the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercia ...

Early years

Ground Zero opened its first gallery site in 1984. It remained in this location until the following year, when it moved into a larger space on East Tenth Street facing

Tompkins Square Park Tompkins Square Park is a public park in the Alphabet City, Manhattan, Alphabet City portion of East Village, Manhattan, East Village, Manhattan, New York City. The square-shaped park, bounded on the north by 10th Street (Manhattan), East 10th ...

. Romberger and Van Cook presented and pioneered the concept of installations and multimedia environments and hosted many performance events. These included the première of

Cinema of Transgression __notoc__ The Cinema of Transgression is a term coined by Nick Zedd in 1985 to describe a New York City-based underground film movement, consisting of a loose-knit group of artists using shock value and black humor in their films. Key players in th ...

director

Richard Kern Richard Kern (born 1954) is an American underground filmmaker, writer and photographer. He first came to prominence as part of the cultural explosion in the East Village of New York City in the 1980s, with erotic and experimental films like ...

’s ''You Killed Me First'', featuring

Karen Finley Karen Finley (born 1956) is an American performance artist, musician and poet. Her performance art, recordings, and books are used as forms of activism. Her work frequently uses nudity and profanity. Finley incorporates depictions of sexuality, ...

and

David Wojnarowicz David Michael Wojnarowicz ( (September 14, 1954 – July 22, 1992) was an American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist, and AIDS activist prominent in the East Village art scene. He incorp ...

, which was part of an installation presented by David Wojnarowicz entitled ''Installation number 8''. Other installations presented were ''Hell'' by Mike Osterhout, ''Zero Gravity'' by Dragan Ilic and ''Cold War'' by Marguerite Van Cook. The Gallery was also home to collaborative installations, such as ''The Nuclear Family'' curated by

Carlo McCormick Carlo McCormick is an American culture critic and curator living in New York City. He is the author of numerous books, monographs and catalogues on contemporary art and artists. Pedagogic and art writing activities McCormick was Senior Edito ...

featuring the work of David West, Keiko Bonk, Andy Soma,

, James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook. Artists shown by Ground Zero include: Edward Brezinski, Peggy Cyphers, John Drury, Christof Kohlhofer, David West, David Wojnarowicz, Calvin Reid,

PHASE 2 Michael Lawrence Marrow (August 2, 1955 – December 12, 2019), known as PHASE 2 and Lonny Wood, was an American aerosol paint artist based in New York City. Mostly active in the 1970s, Phase 2 is generally credited with originating the "bubble l ...

, Sharp, Delta Dos, Arnold Wechsler,

Martin Wong Martin Wong (; July 11, 1946 – August 12, 1999) was a Chinese-American Visual arts of the United States, painter of the late 20th century. His work has been described as a meticulous blend of social realism and visionary art, visionary art st ...

and Michael Roman. In 1986 the gallery moved again to a site on East Ninth Street where among the curations was the David Wojnarowicz show ''Mexican Diaries'', which informs portions of the video ''A Fire in My Belly'', the subject of the 2011 controversy sparked by the removal of the work from the exhibition ''Hide/Seek'' at the National Portrait Gallery.

Night club curation

During the 1980s, the New York City nightclub scene provided the home for many alternative art installations. The Ground Zero team of Van Cook and Romberger curated many nightclub art shows, at venues such as

Danceteria Danceteria was a nightclub that operated in New York City from 1979 until 1986 and in the Hamptons until 1995. The club operated in various locations over the years, a total of three in New York City and four in the Hamptons. The most famous locati ...

, Palace de Beaute, Kamikaze, The World and Max Fish. These shows included many other notable artists including: John Drury,

Stephen Lack Stephen Lack (born January 1, 1946) is a Canadian artist and former actor and screenwriter best known for his leading role in David Cronenberg's ''Scanners'' and Allan Moyle's ''The Rubber Gun'', for which he was nominated for two Genie Awards. ...

Manuel De Landa Manuel DeLanda (born 1952) is a Mexican- American writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is a lecturer in architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture and the University of Pennsylvania School ...

Joseph Nechvatal Joseph Nechvatal (born January 15, 1951) is an American post-conceptual digital artist and Aesthetics, art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses. Life and work ...

Kiki Smith Kiki Smith (born January 18, 1954) is a West German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS and gender, whil ...

, Walter Robinson, Julius Klein,

Nick Zedd Nick may refer to: * Nick (given name) * A cricket term for a slight deviation of the ball off the edge of the bat * British slang for being arrested * British slang for a police station * British slang for stealing * Short for nickname Place ...

, Thom Corn, Mark and Matt Enger, Conrad Vogel,

Phoebe Legere Phoebe Hemenway Legere is a multi-disciplinary artist. She is a Juilliard-educated composer, soprano, pianist and accordionist, painter, poet, and a film maker. A graduate of Vassar College with a four octave vocal range, Legere has recorded fo ...

, Cheryl Dyer, Selwyn Garaway.

Comic

The comic strip by the name of ''Ground Zero'', written and drawn Romberger and Van Cook, is a semi-autobiographical, meta-narrative look at the authors’ lives on the Lower East Side and beyond. In its inception, the comic was heavily influenced by the philosophy of

Roland Barthes Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular ...

, deconstructionism and film-maker Jean Marie Straub. The strip/pages were conceptually designed to challenge the reader. Consequently, it was rarely printed in the same publication more than three times and experimented with diverse drawing styles, media and processes of printing."Creating Comics!" Eds. Judith Salavetz and Spencer Drate. Rockport Publishers, 2010. p.120-123

References

External links

''Ground Zero'' comic
{{coord, 40.727, -73.981, type:landmark_globe:earth_region:US-NY, display=title Art museums and galleries in Manhattan Art galleries established in 1984 1984 establishments in New York City East Village, Manhattan