Rivington School was a movement that emerged from the
East Village art scene in the 1980s 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 ...
. Most of the artists of the Rivington School were either involved in welding, forging, performance or street painting.
The group started in 1983 and named themselves after an abandoned public school house building located on
Rivington Street
Rivington Street is a street in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which runs across the Lower East Side neighborhood, between the Bowery and Pitt Street, with a break between Chrystie and Forsyth for Sara D. Roosevelt Park. Vehicular traffi ...
.
The school was located across from a club
No Se No where many artists would meet and performances were held. The group is most noted for "massive junk sculpture installations on the
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, sometimes abbreviated as LES, is a historic neighborhood in the southeastern part of Manhattan in New York City. It is located roughly between the Bowery and the East River from Canal to Houston streets.
Traditionally an im ...
,"
and other forms of metal public sculpture.
Sculpture Gardens
Many public and guerilla sculpture spaces emerged from the Rivington School, most notably the
Rivington Sculpture Garden, originally constructed on Rivington Street near Forsyth Street. It was started by early founder
"Cowboy" Ray Kelly. Due to the unpermitted nature of the work, the Rivington Sculpture Garden was regularly knocked down by the city. Eventually it found a home at 6th Street, between Avenue B and Avenue C;
and the Corragio Studio, more commonly known as "2B" or "The Garage", started by another early founder of the movement,
Linus Coraggio.
The name "2B" refers to its location at 2nd Street and Avenue B in the
East Village of
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 ...
, on which a condominium building now stands. The construction and destruction of the
Rivington Sculpture Garden was documented by
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone could perform in his ...
aka
Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor (aka " Monty Cantsin", and "Amen!") ( hu, Kántor István; born August 27, 1949, Hungary) is a Canadian performance and video artist, industrial music and electropop singer, and one of the early members of Neoism.
Life
Kantor was ...
on super8film "ANTI CREDO".
Early artists
Among the early artists of the Rivington School were
Toyo Tsuchiya
Toyo Tsuchiya (1948 – 23 November 2017) was a Japanese born artist and photographer and one of the early artists involved in the Rivington School art movement of the East Village art scene of New York City of the 1980s.
Toyo Tsuchiya moved fro ...
,
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone could perform in his ...
aka
Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor (aka " Monty Cantsin", and "Amen!") ( hu, Kántor István; born August 27, 1949, Hungary) is a Canadian performance and video artist, industrial music and electropop singer, and one of the early members of Neoism.
Life
Kantor was ...
,
Shalom Neuman
FusionArts Museum(s), first founded at 57 Stanton Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side are a series of curated exhibition spaces dedicated to the exhibition and archiving of "fusion art". The museum was and remains at its successive locations a ...
,
Paolo Buggiani
Paolo Buggiani (born 9 May 1933) is an Italian contemporary artist.
His work is characterized by using dynamic media superimposed on an existing cityscape, rather than using static media, like figures that are skating, sailing, or running while o ...
,
Jacek Tylicki
Jacek Tylicki (born 1951 in Sopot, Poland) is a Polish artist who settled in New York City in 1982. Tylicki works in the field of land art, installation art, and site-specific art. His conceptual projects often raise social and environmental i ...
and
Ena Paul Kostabi.
See also
*
Adam Purple
Adam Purple (born David Lloyd Wilkie; November 10, 1930 – September 14, 2015) was an activist and urban Edenist or " Guerrilla Gardener" famous in New York City for his "Garden of Eden". His birth name was David Lloyd Wilkie, although he went b ...
Bibliography
* C. Carr, On edge: performance at the end of the twentieth century. , Wesleyan University Press, 2008
* “Local History: The Battle for Bohemia in the East Village” (with James Cornwell), chapter in
Julie Ault
Julie Ault (born 1957) is an American artist, curator, and editing, editor who was a cofounder of Group Material, a New York-based artists' collaborative that has produced over fifty exhibitions and public projects exploring relationships betwee ...
, ed., Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985 (University of Minnesota Press, 2002)
* Holland Cotter, “Art in Review: Toyo Tsuchiya, 'Six O'Clock Observed',” ''New York Times'', June 18, 1999.
* New Art Examiner, Volume 17, Chicago, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. New Art Associations, 1989
* Richard Armijo, “Rivington Street Style,” ''East Informer'', no. 2, 1987.
References
External links
*{{cite web, url=http://rivingtonschool.com/about.html , title=Rivington School Website: About Us , website=Rivingtonschool.com , date= , accessdate=2016-11-23
American art movements
Culture of Manhattan
East Village, Manhattan