“The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”

-David Harvey, “The Right to the City” 2008

These essays introduce some of the most foundational galleries and performance spaces in the East Village from 1980 to 1994. All were either founded and run by queer-identified people or were committed to showing a substantial body of queer artists and their work. The spaces documented here showcased groundbreaking work that spanned across theater, painting, sculpture, drag, music, and performance art. As the very term “East Village” is largely a byproduct of the real estate industry and its self-serving terminology, the galleries range across the geographical boundaries of what we now know as the East Village and the Lower East Side.

My goal is to add and revise the essays as my research continues, providing additional photographs, multimedia references, and archival materials. Although some of the spaces included in this series have already been documented in the history of the East Village, some are more obscure, which should not be taken as a sign of insignificant or irrelevance. Spaces could last for years or for months, and galleries changed addresses as quickly as they changed artists and shows. Constant transformations of space and location is a vein that runs through all the essays in this series.

Gallery owners were usually artists themselves, and for most the business-side of running a gallery did not hold much appeal. Making ends meet or having balanced budgets at the end of each month was not a priority or a skill in much abundance in the community as a whole, and the financial success of a gallery often paled in comparison to the careers it managed to launch. Gallery owners believed in the work and the political messaging far more than they understood the commercial underbelly of running a business, and this was also a major contributor to the consistent turbulence in locations.

Another constant theme is the emergence of performance spaces and galleries in some of the more unconventional of locations, including storefronts, laundromats, bathrooms, limousines, and 200-year-old farmhouses with audible streams running under them. The reappropriation of commercial and other spaces was very much in line with Soho’s reappropriation of industrial spaces in the 1960s and 1970s, the success of which was a primary driver of the new artistic generation’s migration east. Some of these gallery spaces also served as living quarters for their proprietors, allowing them to curate as well as create, although none could claim that the living standards were ever high given the dismal state of the neighborhood and the lack of basic utilities, especially in the early 1980s.

The 1980s were a time of financial and physical devastation for the city in general, with the East Village and the Lower East Side feeling the effects of drug abuse, unemployment, and homelessness more than other neighborhoods. The surplus of empty tenements, storefronts, warehouses, and other buildings were the result of the economic catastrophe that was New York during that period, but this urban ruin was exactly what allowed creative communities to have new spaces to live and make art. As Anne Bowler and Blaine McBurney write, “By the late 1970s, nearly 700 buildings and lots had been closed, approximately 60% of the neighborhood’s total buildings, due to owner abandonment and tax default. With waves of immigration, a lucrative drug trade increasing crime, and white flight decreasing the population, those moving to New York City became quickly priced out of the then gentrifying neighborhoods of SoHo and Greenwich Village. By the mid-1970s, many creative types could afford the low cost of living in the East Village and Lower East Side.”

The neighborhood was particularly fertile for the queer community, especially benefiting the priced-out West Village artists who were in need of more space and cheaper rents. Although already entrenched in queer experimental theater in the 1960s and 1970s (in places such as The Phoenix, La MaMa, and The Gate Theatre), the visual arts were not as well represented. The East Village was known as Yiddish Broadway in the early twentieth century, and Second Avenue from 14th Street to East Houston Street was the apex of Jewish art and culture within New York City, if not the United States, as theatres, cafes, and other cultural institutions covered the neighborhood. This ended by mid-century, leaving most of the enormous theaters empty, and they were quickly taken over by various experimental theater groups, virtually all of them queer. This post-Stonewall generation benefited from more visibility and community spaces than previous generations had enjoyed, which allowed them to both sustain queer-exclusive spaces and mix easily in shared spaces such as the Mudd Club and Club 57.

The galleries and the art that came out of the East Village provide a multi-layer perspective into the environment and time in which they were created. The rise of right-wing Reaganism, trickle-down economics, hyper-capitalism, and militarism were the backdrop to the rise of a queer aesthetic that was aware of how much of a target it still was, even in what was considered the relative safety of New York City. Indeed, New York City led the country in reported anti-queer hate crimes in the early 1990s. The arrival of HIV/AIDS compounded an already-debilitating drug crisis that was ending the lives of many in the artistic community, along with many across the Lower East Side in general, and HIV/AIDS accelerated both the intensity and the political urgency of creative work.

In a way, the successes of the galleries worked in tandem with drugs, HIV/AIDS, gentrification, predatory real estate investments, and the politics of Mayor Rudy Giuliani to turn the East Village into yet another formerly affordable neighborhood for galleries and artists. But that does not diminish the importance of the people and institutions during this time. These essays aim to document the galleries and artists who lived and worked through this fraught yet fertile period—not only to preserve their contributions to art history, but also to understand how their cultural production thrived in the midst of crisis. The history of these East Village spaces is also part of a larger story about resistance, creativity, and the persistent struggle for visibility and survival in the face of systemic neglect and marginalization.

Bowler, Anne, and Blaine McBurney. “Gentrification and the Avant-Garde in New York’s East Village: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Theory, Culture & Society 8, no. 2 (1991): 51–70.

David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review, no. 53 (September 2008): 23.