Roaming the city with no particular reason in mind was something I enjoyed in my 20’s, and something that since the end of Covid in early 2024, I have returned to.
My purpose is to write mainly about the artists in the studio, or in my memory of encounters with their work over time. Some reviews now and then. My Retrospection column is mostly about exhibitions remembered, mixed in with journal style exposition about studio visits I made when I was still curating.
It's not just business. It's generational change. The scene grows and flows, deconstructs, and comes back again in different ways with different voices. There are still plenty of great small galleries, you just don't know the names. Here's a place to look: https://downtowngallerymap.com/
It was actually starting in 2023 although I didn’t make it down there for a year. I live in the East 70’s so besides a kind of isolation mind cultivated during Covid I was out of the habit of using subways. It took Marian Goodman’s arrival and inaugural opening in October to get me down there. I still haven’t seen it all.
I was shocked at how much New York has changed last time I visited. I lived there in the early 1980s and frequently visited when my mom lived in the village in the late 60s and all through the 70s (she finally went to Brooklyn in about 1980). I was a cabinetmaker’s apprentice in a shop on the Brooklyn waterfront in those days and got the tradesman’s view of the city all through those years when we delivered and installed jobs from Tribeca to the west 70s and East 80s. A different world now – but your portrait of Tribeca brings it back!
I'm glad to hear that there is a new place for galleries in NYC. I had a show at the Washburn gallery in Chelsea just before they closed down in 2023 after a fifty year run. It as so sad. So many of the great old small New York Galleries have shuttered.
My purpose is to write mainly about the artists in the studio, or in my memory of encounters with their work over time. Some reviews now and then. My Retrospection column is mostly about exhibitions remembered, mixed in with journal style exposition about studio visits I made when I was still curating.
It's not just business. It's generational change. The scene grows and flows, deconstructs, and comes back again in different ways with different voices. There are still plenty of great small galleries, you just don't know the names. Here's a place to look: https://downtowngallerymap.com/
It was actually starting in 2023 although I didn’t make it down there for a year. I live in the East 70’s so besides a kind of isolation mind cultivated during Covid I was out of the habit of using subways. It took Marian Goodman’s arrival and inaugural opening in October to get me down there. I still haven’t seen it all.
That was unfortunately a Monday. Ttibeca is the new gallery scene. It’s a reinvigorated environment.
I was shocked at how much New York has changed last time I visited. I lived there in the early 1980s and frequently visited when my mom lived in the village in the late 60s and all through the 70s (she finally went to Brooklyn in about 1980). I was a cabinetmaker’s apprentice in a shop on the Brooklyn waterfront in those days and got the tradesman’s view of the city all through those years when we delivered and installed jobs from Tribeca to the west 70s and East 80s. A different world now – but your portrait of Tribeca brings it back!
That was unfortunately a Monday. Tribeca is newly reinvigorated as the gallery scene. Great fun!
I'm glad to hear that there is a new place for galleries in NYC. I had a show at the Washburn gallery in Chelsea just before they closed down in 2023 after a fifty year run. It as so sad. So many of the great old small New York Galleries have shuttered.