Postmasters is a

contemporary art gallery A contemporary art gallery is normally a commercial art gallery operated by an art dealer which specializes in displaying for sale contemporary art, usually new works of art by living artists. This approach has been called the "Castelli Method" ...

located in

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 ...

Tribeca Tribeca (), originally written as TriBeCa, is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Its name is a syllabic abbreviation of "Triangle Below Canal Street". The "triangle" (more accurately a quadrilateral) is bounded by Canal Stree ...

neighborhood, owned and directed by Magda Sawon and Tamas Banovich. The Postmasters gallery opened in the East Village in December 1984, moved to

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 develo ...

in 1989, and was relocated to

Chelsea Chelsea or Chelsey may refer to: Places Australia * Chelsea, Victoria Canada * Chelsea, Nova Scotia * Chelsea, Quebec United Kingdom * Chelsea, London, an area of London, bounded to the south by the River Thames ** Chelsea (UK Parliament consti ...

in September 1998. In June 2013 Postmasters was moved to 54 Franklin Street in Tribeca, taking over a ground-floor space complete with a large functional basement. The gallery has a history of exhibiting work in media that is challenging for a

commercial art gallery An art dealer is a person or company that buys and sells Work of art, works of art, or acts as the intermediary between the buyers and sellers of art. An art dealer in contemporary art typically seeks out various artists to represent, and build ...

, including the work of several

Net.art net.art refers to a group of artists who have worked in the medium of Internet art since 1994. Some of the early adopters and main members of this movement include Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Heath Bunting, Daniel Gar ...

ists and political activists. For example, Maciej Wisniewski's media-rich e-mail software Netomat was exhibited as an artwork at the gallery in 1999 before being exhibited at the

Whitney Museum of Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

in 2000. The gallery's decision to exhibit software as an art form engages the Marshall McLuhan-coined concept "

The medium is the message "The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan and the name of the first chapter in his '' Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man'', published in 1964.Originally published in 1964 by Me ...

" by updating it with Wisnieski's belief that the artist's role is to challenge the existing notion of software development and distribution.' And in May 2010,

Chatroulette Chatroulette is an online chat website that pairs random users with a choice between two other users for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website begin an online chat (audio, and video) with another visitor. At any point, either user ...

became both medium and subject for artists

Eva & Franco Mattes Eva & Franco Mattes (both born in Italy in 1976) are a duo of artists based in New York City. Operating under the pseudonym 0100101110101101.org, they are counted among the pioneers of the Net Art movement and are known for their subversion of ...

AKA 0100101110101101.ORG. On September 6, 2001, German-born artist

Wolfgang Staehle Wolfgang Staehle is an early pioneer of net.art in the United States, known for his video streaming of the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City during the September 11 attacks. He also captured the crash of the first plane into the ...

, installed three live-feed video projections in the gallery, one of which was a panoramic view of Lower Manhattan, which would remain on view for the rest of the month. The feed captured the

terrorist attacks of September 11th 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 commerci ...

, transforming a fixed image of the city into what the art critic

Roberta Smith Roberta Smith (born 1948) is co-chief art critic of ''The New York Times'' and a lecturer on contemporary art. She is the first woman to hold that position. Early life Born in 1948 in New York City and raised in Lawrence, Kansas. Smith studied a ...

of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' called "a live history painting." In 2007, Hong Kong-based artist and

Internet activist Internet activism is the use of electronic communication technologies such as social media, e-mail, and podcasts for various forms of activism to enable faster and more effective communication by citizen movements, the delivery of particular infor ...

Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung () is a Chinese-American new media artist who lives and works in New York. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Arts degree from San Francisco State University. Hung's works are digital collages of popular culture and current ...

exhibited a video critical of the

George W. Bush Administration George W. Bush's tenure as the 43rd president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 2001, and ended on January 20, 2009. Bush, a Republican from Texas, took office following a narrow victory over Democratic ...

entitled "Because Washington Is Hollywood for Ugly People". On occasion, Sawon has allowed artists to direct the public's attention to her own role as an

art dealer An art dealer is a person or company that buys and sells works of art, or acts as the intermediary between the buyers and sellers of art. An art dealer in contemporary art typically seeks out various artists to represent, and builds relationsh ...

. In 1992 the gallery hosted an exhibition of work by Silvia Kolbowski that featured posters of the gallery itself. In an event called "Ask the Dealer," during the month-long

Hashtag Class ''#class'' was a month-long series of events at Winkleman Gallery in New York that took place between February 20 to March 20, 2010 organized by artists William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton. The exhibition combined social media and networking wit ...

series at

Winkleman Gallery Winkleman is a surname, a variant of German and Jewish Winkelmann, which referred to someone who either lived at a corner or owned a shop there. It may refer to the following notable people: *Claudia Winkleman (born 1972), English television presen ...

in 2010, Sawon promised to truthfully answer any question asked of her regarding her experience as a gallerist.

References

External links

* {{coord, 40, 43, 1.7, N, 74, 0, 10.2, W, type:landmark_region:US-NY, display=title Art museums and galleries in Manhattan Art galleries established in 1984 1984 establishments in New York City Chelsea, Manhattan Contemporary art galleries in the United States Tribeca