Back in the late '70s and early '80s, the downtown art scene in NYC was hot. Artists like Robert Mappelthorpe, Patti Smith, Keith Haring, and David Wojnarowicz were making their mark.
Currently, the NYU Grey Art Gallery has a show up which explores this fertile time in downtown art scene. It's mainly photographs with some video, culled from the University's extensive Fales Archive. Some of the more surprising pictures are documentation of a performance art series that happened in the summer between 1978 and 1985 on a sandy beach, made from the excavation for the World Trade Center, which would eventually become Battery Park City. (The photo above is by Village Voice photographer Robin Holland.) The group that put this together was called Creative Time and there are pictures here that look like something you might see at Burning Man but are actually lower Manhattan.
The show "Mining the Fales Archive" closes on April 3 so it's worth checking out this weekend. And it's free!
