The Real Estate Show
The Real Estate Show was a Colab sponsored illegal occupation exhibition on the subject of landlord speculation in real estate[1] held on New Year's Eve in January 1980 in a vacant city-owned building at 123 Delancey Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The squatter action followed a year of long and frustrating campaigning to rent the property for an exhibition space from officials of the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).[2]
On New Year's Day the show was officially opened to the public. It was to be a two-week occupation/exhibit but was closed down by the police. On the morning of January 2, the Colab artists discovered the storefront padlocked from the inside, their work locked within. Phone calls revealed it to be the doing of HPD. The Real Estate Show had been open exactly one day.[3]
On January 8, the artists, accompanied by art dealer Ronald Feldman and German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys assembled at the site to protest its closing in the company of reporters from the New York Times, Soho News, and the East Village Eye.[4]
On January 11 city workers swept into 123 Delancey, cleared out the exhibited work and trucked it to an uptown warehouse. It was not until a few days later that artists were granted entry into the warehouse to take their art back home.[5]
On January 16 a deal was reached with the city that gave birth to ABC No Rio when, as a compromise, a city agency gave the artists control of nearby 156 Rivington Street.[6]
The Real Estate Show Revisited
In early 2014, there were four concurrent art exhibitions in New York City around The Real Estate Show: at James Fuentes Gallery, ABC No Rio, the Lodge Gallery, and Cuchifritos Gallery/Essex Street Market.[7][8][9] [10][11]
Footnotes
- ↑ The Real Estate Show Manifesto or Statement of Intent Committee for the Real Estate Show, 1980
- ↑ Julie Ault. Alternative Art, New York, 1965-1985 University of Minnesota Press, 2002: p.217.
- ↑ Carlo McCormick, The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984, Princeton University Press, 2006
- ↑ The Real Estate Show By Lehmann Weichselbaum, East Village Eye, 1980
- ↑ The Real Estate Show By Lehmann Weichselbaum, East Village Eye, 1980
- ↑ The Formation of ABC NO RIO
- ↑ The Real Estate Show Revisited
- ↑ Article on James Fuentes Gallery show "Real Estate Show, Then...And Now"
- ↑ “The Real Estate Show” Slideshow and Commentary
- ↑ Putting the ‘No’ in ‘Nostalgia’ by Robert C. Morgan
- ↑ "Lower East Side: The Real Estate Show Redux" by Natasha Kurchanova at Studio International
References
- Julie Ault, Alternative Art, New York, 1965-1985, University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
- David Little, Colab Takes a Piece, History Takes It Back: Collectivity and New York Alternative Spaces, Art Journal Vol.66, No. 1, Spring 2007, College Art Association, New York, pp. 60–74 (Article )
- Carlo McCormick, The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984, Princeton University Press, 2006.
- Alan W. Moore, Artists' Collectives: Focus on New York, 1975-2000 in Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, Blake Stimson & Gregory Sholette, (eds) University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2007, pp. 193–221.
- Alan W. Moore and Marc Miller (eds), ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery, Collaborative Projects, NY, 1985.