After studying commercial art for a brief period, Keith Haring moved to New York in 1978 and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts. There, he befriended many of the artists on view in this exhibition, including classmates Kenny Scharf and Futura, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who would write his graffiti tag “SAMO” on walls near campus. In 1980, Haring began making chalk drawings on the black sheets of paper covering unused advertising boards in the city subway with such regularity that his work became familiar to commuters. That year, he participated in the “Times Square Show”—a collaborative exhibition presented in a defunct massage parlor in the city’s Midtown neighborhood— and began organizing exhibitions and performances of artists from the hip hop scene at music clubs and other alternative spaces. He quickly ascended to international fame and produced over 50 works of public art between 1982 and 1989. In the years leading up to his death from AIDS in 1990, Haring used his art to advocate for safe sex, AIDS awareness, gay rights, and other issues of public health and safety.

Haring’s works on view are diverse in form but united by his iconic linework, a style that updates the primitive marks of Neolithic cave drawings, inspired by graffiti and the Art Brut concept of expression born from unrestrained creative impulse. Haring made this particular work by spray-painting the roof of a mail delivery truck.

Several of the Haring drawings on view reference the Pop Shop, an accessible merchandise store opened in 1986 to which Haring hoped “not only collectors could come, but also kids from the Bronx.” The Pop Shop operated like any other retail store, though in truth it was the apotheosis of Haring’s overarching project to bring art to a wider audience in a diverse range of forms, styles, and functions. Included among these works are a series of white jumpsuits hand-painted by Haring. These were worn by the inner-city youths he hired to run the shop.

Charlie Ahearn moved to New York City in 1973 to attend a prestigious study program for artists at the Whitney Museum of American Art. There, he joined the artist group Colab (abbreviated from “Collaborative Projects”), which was interested in exploring work outside the traditional art establishment. To “get away from the galleries,” as he put it, Ahearn became involved with Black and Puerto Rican culture in the public housing projects on the Lower East Side. There, he made the kung fu movie Deadly Art of Survival on Super 8 film, marking a transition in his practice from 16 mm art films to his first feature-length production. While working on the Lower East Side, Ahearn developed an interest in graffiti artist Lee Quiñones, who was unknown to the galleries even though his work was ubiquitous in public spaces throughout the city. In the summer of 1980, Ahearn commissioned Fab 5 Freddy and Lee to create a graffiti mural, beginning a collaboration that culminated in the feature-length film Wild Style. In addition to his films, Ahearn makes mixed media and silkscreen paintings inspired by the rejected slides from his hip hop films and other photographs.

Wild Style is now recognized as the first hip hop film, cataloging the confluence of music, dance, and underground art that generated the early hip hop culture of 1980s New York City. The film’s title nods to the graffiti painting style of the same name, characterized by lively, interlocking letters and motifs of motion such as arrows. This low-budget, independently produced movie—filmed without permits in the South Bronx, Lower East Side, and subway train yards—became a global classic. It follows a celebrated but pseudonymous graffiti artist named Raymond as he encounters hip hop personalities who would go on to make history. The tension between Raymond’s underground art and the commissioned murals of the Union Crew graffiti artists foreshadows the co-opting of the hip hop aesthetic by commercial establishments.

Martin Wong was a Chinese-Latino American artist whose surreal paintings celebrated his queerness, complex racial identity, and cultural plurality. Wong spent the first 30 years of his life primarily in San Francisco. Trained as a ceramicist, he abandoned the medium for painting when a museum barred his work from a 1970 exhibition because it used glitter. Wong moved to New York in 1978, and in 1982, he moved to the Lower East Side, which became the primary subject of his work throughout the 1980s. There, he fell in love with Miguel Piñero, a Pulitzer-winning author and cofounder of Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Piñero and Wong collaborated on paintings incorporating poetry, American Sign Language, and graffiti. Fascinated by graffiti artists’ embellishment of text, Wong amassed one of the most important collections of American graffiti drawings and paintings, including from numerous artists featured in this exhibition.

Wong’s paintings offer humorous and romantic vignettes of what he called “the endless layers of conflict that has us all bound together” in the 1980s Lower East Side. Both The Flood and Sharp and Dottie feature tender moments amid the chaos and ruins of Downtown. In the latter, a couple embraces on an abandoned couch between rubble and a towering, crumbling building. Curator and critic Dan Cameron suggests that these paintings were meant “to capture the visual essence of urban abandonment and, simultaneously, to linger over the details that hint at the possibility of renewed life.”

Wong’s Obsolete Creatures, painted near the end of the decade, alludes to the losses of AIDS and displacement, but also points to other turmoils and extinctions to come. The artist himself would die from AIDS in 1999. The ceiling of Wong’s natural history museum has dissolved, revealing the depths of the galaxy above the dinosaur skeletons. The stars constellating into abstract patterns are—like much of the art in this exhibition—charts by which to navigate the ruins of the Downtown, and somewhere else, still distant, that was nevertheless slowly coming into view.

Diane Burns was a Native American poet and artist whose work used incisive humor to address experiences and subvert stereotypes of Native Americans living in the United States. Born in Lawrence, Kansas, Burns grew up in the western U.S., moving around for her parents’ work at native tribal schools. In 1974, she relocated to New York City for her university studies. By the 1980s, Burns was an active member of the Lower East Side poetry community, performing frequently at the Bowery Poetry Club and co-founding the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Burns relished performing, declaring that she “would rather read poetry in front of an audience more than almost anything else.”

In the opening shot of Alphabet City Serenade, a piece of trash blows across an abandoned dirt lot in the Lower East Side like a tumbleweed. The juxtaposition of the apparently desolate, undeveloped urban landscape and Burns’ reading of her poem emphasizes a parallel between the Lower East Side and the historical American “Wild West,” where white settlers forcibly displaced Native Americans. The poem recounts the state of perpetual marginality that indigenous people have suffered due the legacy of Manifest Destiny, a nineteenth-century term that described the colonial mindset of the early United States, advocating a right for the country to expand its territorial boundaries across the continent. Despite forced removal, Burns noted, Native Americans are not “just skulking in the desert or wandering around in the woods,” but rather “much of New York is Indian country.” Burns’ abrupt, concluding question—“so you want to talk about gentrification?”—draws a connection between wealthier people displacing the poorer inhabitants of the Lower East Side and the U.S. government taking the land of native peoples.

Jane Dickson moved from Chicago to New York in 1977 and landed a job programming animated advertisements for the first digital light board in Times Square. Dickson convinced her boss to allow her to advertise the seminal 1980 “Times Square Show” of the artist collective Colab, to which she, John Ahearn, and others in the exhibition belonged. Primarily responsible for the night shift, Dickson became familiar with the shadows of people moving in the dim glow of the artificial lights. She began photographing strangers, often lone figures backlit by the city, which she made into paintings and drawings. Although Dickson lived and worked in the area, she noted that “Times Square was always about transients,” because “it was not a community in any normal sense.” The subjects of Dickson’s paintings are caught in acts, performances, or transgressions that mark their psychological isolation, even if they are in company.

Dickson’s four works on view in the exhibition take up subjects at the nexus of commerce, nightlife, and advertising. Hotel Carter suggests the seedy nightlife surrounding the hotel on 43rd Street, infamous for its dirtiness and crime, where the city rented rooms for unhoused people between 1984 and 1988. In Dreams Adult Bar, a dark figure holds an advertisement for entertainment. Dickson’s use of red paper for these two drawings lends the signage letters grainy halos evocative of cathode ray tube television screens. Opposite these two works, the masked figure in Bus Stop Boy, dressed for the frigid New York winter, is backlit by an ad for a beach retreat, a reality surreally distant from his own. Moving into the next room, in Nathans 43rd Street, a dark vignette at the edges of the canvas frames the subjects on the stairs that connect Nathan’s Famous underground hot dog restaurant with the street above. Dickson freezes the quiet presence of these transient figures in the city’s commercial glow.

“It is exhausting,” wrote the indefatigable David Wojnarowicz, “living in a population where people don’t speak up if what they witness doesn’t directly threaten them.” Wojnarowicz was a “spokesman for the unspeakable,” whose art and activism tirelessly centered on outsiders. The artist moved to New York to escape an abusive father, and he was living on the street by age 17. He thought of himself primarily as a writer until 1980, when he met photographer Peter Hujar, whose works are also on view in the exhibition. The older artist became a mentor to Wojnarowicz, and Hujar’s encouragement gave him the motivation to paint and survive. As the AIDS crisis escalated, Wojnarowicz channeled his rage at the government’s inaction into his art. He also was an outspoken member of ACT UP, an activist group working on behalf of people living with AIDS. The artist died of the illness at age 37.

Self-trained and street-smart, Wojnarowicz used the materials of the streets as his canvases. He made graffiti works with stencils, which he also used on paper and other supports like supermarket food posters and refuse. The paintings Untitled (Screaming Bird) and Dog turn circular trashcan lids into unlikely, gritty portrait tondos of animals. Science Totem takes a natural crack in a piece of wood and transforms it into the grinning mouths of a double-headed beast evocative of indigenous commemorative monuments. In Wojnarowicz’s works featuring earth, wind, fire, and water, each element is a perpetrator or product of violence: earth is depicted as irreparably damaged, water burns, and wind and fire enact destruction. Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water situates the elements in the artist’s so-called “Preinvented World,” an allegory for the hierarchies and injustices embedded in the structure of the U.S., in which, Wojnarowicz wrote, “I’ve always felt like an alien.”

Kiely Jenkins’ sculptures offer humorous critiques of American society with a grotesque, punk aesthetic. Jenkins grew up in Manhattan, and he and his classmates took an interest in graffiti, beginning by tagging subway cars. Jenkins later mingled with the downtown art scene, bringing Uptown graffiti to the attention of artist Keith Haring, who organized exhibitions in the Mudd Club. Between 1981 and 1985, Jenkins had five solo exhibitions at Fun Gallery, which also showed artists associated with graffiti like Dondi White and Haring, both included in this exhibition.

Sewer Gator pokes fun at the century-old urban myth that alligators live in the sewers of New York. Here, the alligator is captured and exhibited in a display case that evokes those used in natural history museums. The gator’s bulging eyes, toothy pink smile, and bright green skin evoke the comic artist and custom car designer Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s famed character Rat Fink. Jenkins drew inspiration from underground comics and Hot Rod cartoons, where characters were anatomically exaggerated for expressive, humorous effect. Although New York’s sewer gators are only a legend, Jenkins’ animal hints at ecological imbalances that result from human disruption of the natural environment.

Christy Rupp grew up in Buffalo, a city in western New York state, at a time when the city’s ecology was heavily polluted by steel manufacturing. In the 1960s, Lake Erie, the large body of water that borders Buffalo, was pronounced “dead,” sparking Rupp’s lifelong curiosity about waterways and animal habitats. She moved to New York City in the late 1970s, where she joined meetings of the artist group Colab—along with Jenny Holzer, Jane Dickson, and brothers Charlie and John Ahearn, whose works are also included in the exhibition—in abandoned buildings. Rupp’s works were included in the collective’s 1980 “Times Square Show.” Her public installations in the 1980s featuring rats, parasites, and other animals raised awareness of the relationships between human consumption, geopolitical conflict, and the environment. “Garbage is a combat zone,” the artist said, “where our desire for comfort and function meet the limits of our nest.”

Rupp’s Cardboard Emission Fishes is part of a series of fish sculptures she created to draw attention to the ecological consequences of water pollution. In 1981, Rupp traveled to the Adirondack Mountains north of New York City. She noticed something was unusual about the environment and deepened her research on acid rain’s effects on fish. Although the first series focused on the impact of acid rain on rainbow trout, Rupp expanded her investigation each year to include more types of pollutants. These fish bear the marks of oil spills, mercury poisoning, and factory dumping. Rupp’s art helped to draw attention to the impact of urban chemical pollutants on New York’s neighboring waterways.

Papo Colo is a Puerto Rican artist whose performances critique the borders around sociopolitical participation and exclusion in the United States. Beginning in 1971, Colo took up the burgeoning medium of conceptual performance art, using his own body in actions that drew attention to his place in the body politic. Descended from Spanish colonists and living between New York City and the El Yunque rainforest in Puerto Rico, Colo uses theatricality to cope with his conflicting identities. “I am an invented character,” he has stated, “another fantasy that I need to exist as.” In 1982, Colo co-founded Exit Art, an alternative gallery space hosting artists, dancers, and performers presented under the name Trickster Theatre.

In Against the Current, Colo paddles a canoe upstream in the Bronx River, which bisects the city’s northern borough. As he struggles against the natural force of the water, pollutants and debris float past him. Colo’s action drew attention to the contamination of the river, which became a dumping ground for industrial waste, urban runoff, and sewage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His performance followed a flurry of environmental protection legislation and concurrent environmental activism in the 1970s. Colo’s struggle against the current was also a metaphor for Puerto Rican immigrants to New York, fighting for economic parity, social identity, and belonging in the vast city.

The rigid geometries of Peter Halley’s abstract paintings embody the artist’s conceptual framing of the architecture of power and control in modern society. Halley studied art history at Yale and returned to New York City, where he was born and raised, in 1980. In the sharp angles, towering walls, and narrow streets of the city, Halley saw the realization of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), which describes how society is surveilled, disciplined, and controlled through prisons and public spaces like schools.

Although Halley’s paintings at first glance mimic the simple forms of minimalist artists who were working in the 1960s, he deploys austere geometries to point towards the regimenting of the human body. In a 1986 interview, Halley noted, “the minimalists were interested in lines and walls and volumes from a perceptual point of view. I’ve been interested in the cultural meanings of these same structures.”

Prison and Cell with Smokestack and Conduit at once evokes the gridded urban plan of New York and the rectilinear logic of a circuit board. Halley added dimensional texture to Day-Glo squares with Roll-A-Tex, a material used in the surfacing of buildings. The “conduit” refers to the black line connecting the “prison”—a recurrent form in Halley’s work, denoted by the barred window—and the solid “cell.” Halley’s terms draw from Foucault’s definition of “cellular discipline,” which governs the spatial distribution of bodies. The artist believes that the post-industrial world confines human movement, restricting it to “corridors and streets” that connect buildings which “can only be entered and exited at prescribed hours and speeds.” His conduit doubles as both a corridor and a wire, controlling the flow of current and information between two nodes.

John Ahearn moved to New York City in 1974 to join his twin brother Charlie, whose film Wild Style is on view in this exhibition. John Ahearn was a founding member of Colab (abbreviated from “Collaborative Projects”), a group of artists interested in working beyond the gallery scene and outside the traditional art establishment. In 1979, intrigued by the plaster casts a friend was making for the city’s Museum of Natural History, Ahearn used the technique on the faces of his friends in Colab. He drew crowds while casting strangers at the alternative art gallery Fashion Moda in the South Bronx, eventually collaborating with Rigoberto Torres to make life casts of people in the community. Zunilda, in this exhibition, is one such example of these humanistic plaster busts. Throughout the 1980s, Torres and Ahearn offered community casting workshops and created public murals for the Bronx, making art accessible to the local community. With every work they created, they made an additional cast to stay in the neighborhood.

Maria Greeting Her Mother depicts Bronx resident Maria Fonseca and her mother Regina Rivera, memorializing an intimate moment between mother and daughter. As the artist explained, Maria has stopped on the street to show respect for her mother, who is seated on the sidewalk. Summarizing Ahearn’s practice, one critic suggested that he “takes the people of the mundane world of the South Bronx and allows the work to reveal them.”

Valerie Jaudon is a founding member of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s, which foregrounded decorative forms traditionally associated with femininity and non-Western cultures. In 1978, Jaudon co-authored the essay “Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture,” which discussed how the 1960s minimalist rejection of ornamentation was rooted in sexism and racism. Her abstractions draw from a variety of sources, including folk art, the architecture of the Middle East, and music. She builds complexity through precise layers of simple geometries, limiting most compositions to two colors. Jaudon’s architecture-inspired works have themselves become features of the urban landscape: in 1988, she completed a welded steel fence for a New York subway station.

Jaudon grew up in Mississippi, in the American South, and sometimes named her paintings after towns there. Mineral Wells is located on the border with Tennessee, near Memphis. Jaudon drew the long vertical forms and arches in pencil before filling the bands with color because, as she has stated, when painting she wants “no surprises.” The symmetric composition spans to the edges of the canvas, laying over the black background like a gate or ornate window pattern in a complex system of overlapping forms.

While studying art at university, Robert Longo befriended Cindy Sherman, and the two moved to New York together. In 1977, Longo exhibited in the show “Pictures” at Artists Space, out of which grew the name the Pictures Generation, describing a group of New York artists who appropriated mass media to critique consumerism. Another of those artists was Richard Prince (also included in “Somewhere Downtown”), with whom Longo performed in the rock band Menthol Wars. Punk music became a source of inspiration for Longo’s photorealistic drawings of contorted, flailing figures.

The figure in Longo’s Untitled (from Men Trapped in Ice series) might be jumping with zeal or frozen in freefall. Begun in 1979, the series was exhibited in 1981 at the gallery Metro Pictures to great acclaim and has since become an iconic work of 1980s New York. The ambiguity of this faceless man, whether caught in a moment of ecstasy or agony, captures the passion and style of the period. Longo drew inspiration from the black-and-white cinema of the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, as well as the gyration of bodies seen in the rock and punk music scenes. “Robert shot us in free fall, looking like we were dead,” recalled Sherman, who was among the friends Longo posed and photographed on the roof of his apartment building. “Creating these poses became a sort of dance,” remembered Sherman, “I remember having such a good time.”

Laurie Simmons came of age in Long Island at a time when middle-class American prosperity ushered in an aesthetic of conformity in suburban communities like her own. In 1972, Simmons was inspired by a vintage dollhouse she found in a toy store, and she began photographing dolls and dollhouses to critique the objectification, domesticity, and commercialism embedded in female gender roles. In taking up the products of mass culture as the tools of its critique, Simmons found herself in a community of other women artists then working similarly in New York, including Gretchen Bender, Sarah Charlesworth, Louise Lawler, and Cindy Sherman, whose works are on view nearby. “When I picked up a camera with a group of other women,” said Sherman, “I'm not going to say it was a radical act, but we were certainly doing it in some sort of defiance of, or reaction to, a male-dominated world of painting.” Simmons used dolls to act out staged roles before her camera and artificial sets,, highlighting the performative nature of gender and identity more broadly.

Folded Man Floating on Back is part of Simmons’s early series of dolls that she photographed in fish tanks and full-sized pools, evocative of the suburban neighborhoods and values that she sought to critique. Appearing less relaxed than lost at sea, the subject of her photograph illustrates the alienation and disassociation accompanying the pressures to conform to a picture-perfect middle-class lifestyle.

Her “Tourism” series features monochrome dolls in midcentury style exploring the world; she photographed the doll trio from behind as if they were walking into and among the landmark backdrops. At a time of globalizing mass media and burgeoning leisure travel, Simmons parodies both the idea of experiencing a place through photographs and the way that such images reduce foreign cultures to simple archetypes.

For her “Ballet” series, Simmons photographed a collection of ballerina dolls against images of performances and theater stages, projecting the pictures in her studio as backdrop sets for the dolls. Waltz of the Snowflakes and Ballet Stage literalize the artificiality and performativity inherent in mass media and ideals of female beauty.

Judy Rifka grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and came of age amid the Vietnam War. She spent three years hitchhiking through Europe, viewing classic works of art from the Western canon. Rifka returned to New York in 1966 and, in the late 1970s, joined the artist’s cooperative Colab. Rifka became known for her “paintings in the round,” for which she propped shaped canvases vertically against walls. These works express her interest in architectural forms that emerge into three-dimensional space, approaching the viewer.

Pyramid 1 depicts the pyramids of Egypt, one of Rifka’s few works that reference a specific place. To make these paintings, Rifka pushed thick paint through the back of a rugmaker’s mesh. The resulting textured surface emerges out from the neat mesh grid, oozing and drooping toward the viewer. Rifka noted of her painting practice, “only the accidents are deliberate. The inspiration is in witnessing great accidents surfacing while I absently shuffle programs.” Rifka’s uncontrolled paint upsets the order of primary shapes with wobbly pyramids and an inconsistent grid. The paintings mark a turn towards more organic shapes, contrasting with Rifka’s hard-edged “Single Shape” plywood paintings of the mid-1970s.

Israeli-American artist Haim Steinbach said that his work, broadly, is “about intercultural communication” and “vernacular.” Growing up in Tel Aviv, Steinbach was fascinated by the cultural differences he observed in the domestic goods and personal aesthetics of his friends’ households. Upon moving to New York as a teenager, Steinbach felt that although the city was a melting pot, most art was minimalist and conceptual, lacking what he called “a sense of the clashing of cultures.” Experiencing what he felt was “claustrophobia” in the studio, Steinbach transitioned from painting to arranging objects from the street, supermarkets, antique shops, and flea markets onto shelves. His displays gained attention in the Downtown art scene with his installations at venues including Artists Space and Fashion Moda.

In supremely black, Steinbach calls our attention to the incidental resonances between the colors and graphic design of laundry detergent boxes and the streamlined curves of enameled water pitchers. In 1983, Steinbach began using standard wedge shelves such as this in his displays, giving the works a sleek formality. Though these sculptures may recall retail displays, Steinbach disliked how easily his work became associated with critiques of consumerism. Steinbach pushed back on critics’ interpretation of supremely black as merely about “capitalism.” Rather, he sees the relationships between objects as hinting at “something that’s more universal, […] something that says something about the typology of things.” By bringing together found objects from diverse contexts, Steinbach curates a study of the psychology and culture of making and collecting objects.

Louise Lawler’s photographs reveal the secret lives of artworks once they leave the artist’s studio. By photographing works of art on location in the collections of private owners, galleries, storage sites, and museums, Lawler demonstrates how the value and interpretation of a work of art depend on the setting and manner in which it is presented. Lawler came to New York in 1969 and took a job at Castelli Gallery, which had a celebrated roster of artists including Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella. Beginning in the late 1970s, Lawler and her contemporaries Sarah Charlesworth, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and Richard Prince were recognized for appropriating images from art history and mass media to critique consumer culture; along with others, they came to be known as the Pictures Generation. Lawler’s career coincided with the rise of the speculative market that saw art as a capital investment. Photographing private collections, she brought works that had disappeared from the public eye back into circulation. Lawler combined this appropriative style with a focus on the art market and institutions that had been pioneered by conceptual artists during the 1960s and 70s.

Lawler took a number of photographs in the Connecticut and New York homes of art collectors Burton and Emily Tremaine before the dispersal of much of their collection at auction. The composition of Pollock and Tureen connects the agonized splashes of Jackson Pollock’s Frieze (1953-55) with the fanciful filigree of a soup bowl sitting on a sideboard beneath. Living Room Corner, Arranged by Mr. & Mrs. Burton Tremaine Sr., New York City depicts Robert Delaunay’s painting Premier Disque (1913) hanging behind a television on which an image of the musician Stevie Wonder appears. A Roy Lichtenstein bust, Ceramic Head with Blue Shadow (1966), has been transformed into a living room lamp. The title references Lawler’s first solo exhibition at Metro Pictures in 1982, “Arranged by Louise Lawler,” for which the artist curated a selection of works from the gallery’s storeroom and priced them at the sum of their parts plus commission. Using available light and a 35mm camera, Lawler’s incisive photographs connect the possession and display of art to the construction of high taste.

Martha Rosler grew up in the Brooklyn area of New York City. She was involved in avant-garde poetry and leftist activism from an early age, participating in civil rights and anti-war protests. In 1968, Rosler moved to California during the height of the Women’s Liberation Movement, where she furthered her feminist activism and artistic practice. Through diverse techniques, including video, sculpture, and photomontage, Rosler critiques war, misogyny, homelessness, wealth inequality, and labor. Her most widely known work, the video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), parodies the idea that women should be confined to domestic roles. To Rosler, the commercial push to “consume more” has an underlying political agenda: to “protest less.”

In Global Taste: A Meal in Three Courses—a 3-channel video installed in a carnival-like booth—Rosler draws a connection between the U.S. export of cultural and culinary tastes and Western neo-imperialism. She showcases how “English as the language of power” is used in global marketing campaigns, at home and abroad, to penetrate and homogenize local tastes and traditions and dominate the developing architecture of image and data transmission. In the installation, the left monitor plays television advertisements primarily for food, featuring infants and children, foreigners, and animals, all speaking English. The center screen articulates an argument about U.S. media domination. The third screen displays behind-the-scenes auditions for a soft drink commercial with a looping jingle, “It’s fantastic, it’s so different, it’s got orig-i-nal-i-tee!” Rosler lays bare the impossibility of originality when each actor reads from the same script and plays a role determined for them by their race and age. Taken together, the videos paint a foreboding picture of a world ordered by Western commercial interests that uphold economic and political hierarchies.

In her photography, Sarah Charlesworth appropriated images from newspapers and magazines to examine the impact of mass media on those that consume it. Her style and conceptual rigor situate her practice among a group of artists who came to be called the Pictures Generation, including Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince, and others. In 1977, Charlesworth began her first photographic series, titled “Modern History,” in which she photographed the front pages of newspapers and blanked out everything but the photographs and mastheads, leaving the images floating in blank white space.

The selection of Charlesworth’s work shown here is drawn from her series “Objects of Desire” (1983-1988), for which she isolated and recombined images of cultural objects and figures from print magazines and advertisements, suspending them in monochromatic color fields. “I’m trying to get at the fundamental shape of an idea,” Charlesworth said. “To articulate that shape, you have to pare off an awful lot of chaos or surrounding information.” Taking up global imagery—both American culture syndicated abroad, and foreign imagery consumed domestically in the US—Charlesworth sought to reveal the visual codes that construct and guide desire.

Kenny Scharf came of age in Southern California as part of the first generation of Americans to grow up with television. He was struck by the mass appeal of cartoon characters, especially the Stone Age Flintstones and the futuristic Jetsons, and their ability to express complex emotions to a broad audience. In 1980, he graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he befriended artist Keith Haring. The two collaborated on a work for the “Times Square Show,” where Scharf also showed the assemblage sculpture on view here. Early on, he also exhibited work at the Fun Gallery and in “New York/New Wave,” a landmark exhibition presented in a converted school called P.S.1 (for “public school #1” in the city’s Queens neighborhood). But he continued painting on the street, which he described as “the best way to get out there” and “reach out beyond the elitist boundaries of fine art.” To keep reaching the people that “make [museums] feel uncomfortable,” Scharf has embraced commercial collaboration and merchandising, along with fashion, video, performance art, and sculpture.

Scharf’s works draw from pop culture, Surrealist painters such as Yves Tanguy (1900-1955), and the space-age technologies and aesthetics of mid-century America. Merging aliens, TV, and nuclear-age anxiety, Jetson’s Bomb is a precursor to Scharf’s Cosmic Closet installation of Day-Glo paintings installed the following year in a midtown apartment that he shared with Keith Haring (and rented from Jimmy DeSana, whose work is also included in this exhibition). Soon after, Scharf’s “Cosmic Caverns” were installed in East Village clubs, doubling as art installations and disco venues.

His paintings combine atmospheric sprays of paint with precisely outlined and shaded characters from the cartoon The Jetsons, who stand in for middle-class Americans touring the landscapes of science fiction. “I wished mostly to create the future that never happened that they promised me as a child,” said Scharf, “Whenever we alter our mundane reality, we are not just saying we don’t want to accept it; we are telling each other that we don’t have to accept it.” The largest painting featured here was made originally as a mural for the Palladium nightclub; the artist added to the piece after reclaiming it, but retained many of the scratches and wear on the painting from its time in the club. Both Untitled (Elroy Bug) and Van’s Motel are made with Day-Glo paint that was meant to be illuminated in the blacklight environments that Scharf created.

Jimmy DeSana came to New York City in 1973, photographing key artists and musicians of the East Village scene to fund his studio practice. His photographs from the 1970s and early 1980s critiqued the “American Dream” by defamiliarizing domestic scenes. DeSana staged his friends, nude or wielding surreal props, with saturated theatrical lighting in precarious poses. His subjects—balanced on objects, folded in refrigerators, and bound up in cloth—queer the dull, domestic interiors they occupy. DeSana shared a studio with Laurie Simmons, whose work is featured in this exhibition, and the two often posed for each other.

In 1985, DeSana turned away from the figure and towards abstraction following his diagnosis with HIV. To produce the series of works on view, DeSana made incisions into earlier prints he had made of friends and acquaintances. After peeling back the cuts to reshape the subject’s form, DeSana re-photographed the broken images. In Aluminum Foil, only the outline of embracing figures is left. Shortly before he died of an AIDS-related illness, DeSana reflected to Simmons, “It’s hard to watch people dying at the same time that the art market is booming.” Faced with his mortality, this body of work is DeSana’s meditation on the shape of the human body moving into another, higher dimension.

One of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, Robert Mapplethorpe is known for photographs that push beyond classical aesthetic standards. In 1970, Mapplethorpe acquired a Polaroid camera to take photos for collages, which were his primary medium at the time. By the mid-1970s, he was photographing his friends and acquaintances, including creatives, socialites, and the underground gay community. In 1980, Mapplethorpe began collaborating with bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, launching his exploration of nude figure studies. His 1980s photographs explore formal beauty through flowers, still lifes, and studio portraits. In 1986, Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS, and he accelerated his creative efforts during the following three years before his death.

The white petals of Mapplethorpe’s Tulip and Amaryllis curl against their black backgrounds with the fleshiness of skin. Mapplethorpe first took up flowers as a subject in 1973 and studied them with increasing intensity in the final two years of his life. The artist took these photographs at the height of the AIDS crisis but before his own diagnosis. Mapplethorpe’s meticulously composed and lighted photographs elicit a kind of eroticism; for him, flowers were imbued with vitality yet also served to symbolize the transience of life. As his close friend, singer, and writer Patti Smith, later said, “He came, in time, to embrace the flower as the embodiment of all the contradictions reveling within.”

Luis Frangella was an Argentinian painter and sculptor whose work ranged from expressive, monumental figures to quiet, subtle pieces. He moved to New York City in 1976 and began painting large murals on the walls of construction sites, in nightclubs in the East Village and Tribeca, and in the abandoned Hudson River Pier #34. Frangella became a father figure to some of the younger artists in the East Village scene, including David Wojnarowicz, whose works are also on view in this exhibition. In the early 1980s, Frangella helped organize exhibitions at the club and art space Limbo. After clubbing, he would often cook for the community in his loft.

A departure from Frangella’s massive muscular figures, the small paintings on view take time as their subject. The watches, floating in fields of blues and greys, will wind down and eventually stop. The candle, unattended, will burn itself out. Frangella made these paintings after he had been diagnosed with HIV, and their melancholic undercurrent reflects his awareness of the limited time he had left. Although the paintings may suggest a quiet decline, Frangella joined the ACT UP movement in the final years of his life to fight for the visibility, humanity, and treatment of people living with AIDS.

“I always think the whole history of the world is in your body,” said Kiki Smith. The artist came to New York in 1976, working odd jobs before joining the artist group Colab two years later. The group also included Charlie and John Ahearn, Jenny Holzer, Jane Dickson, Christy Rupp, and other artists whose works are included in the exhibition. Smith started drawing from the medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy in 1979. When her father, sculptor and architect Tony Smith, passed away, her work turned towards the mortality of the human body. In 1985, Smith studied cadavers as an emergency medical technician and developed a clinical understanding of the body, as well as a deep respect and love for it. She saw trauma on bodies as records of their history and started making sculptures that considered the female body in particular as a sociopolitical battleground.

Smith selected diverse materials for her sculptures of dismembered body parts, each of which, for the artist, carried its own unique “psychic and spiritual meaning.” The concrete Skull is weighted with the finality of death and evokes cemetery statuary. But her cracked and mended ribs are suspended together by thin strings, evoking the fragility of life. Throughout the 1980s, Smith lost friends and relatives to AIDS. Although these works were completed before Smith lost her sister to the disease in 1988, they are haunted by her reflections on the physical limits placed on human bodies by illness and mortality.

Chris “Daze” Ellis came of age in Brooklyn, adjacent to the burgeoning downtown culture. Daze and his classmates at the High School of Art and Design developed an interest in the creative spirit reflected in the graffiti marking public spaces. Initially painting on subway cars, Daze and his partners transitioned to making “outlaw installations” on abandoned buildings. Through the club scene, Daze met Keith Haring and other prominent Downtown artists. In 1981, Daze and other graffiti artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat were featured in the exhibition “Beyond Words” at the Mudd Club, an alternative club and art space that featured counterculture events. This marked Daze’s entrance into the commercial gallery scene.

Portrait of a Saxophone reflects Daze’s transition to more figurative and personal work as he moved from street art to painting on canvas. In the painting, rays of sunlight break over the purple New York cityscape behind a man with a saxophone to his lips. Although only the neck of the instrument is visible, the title of the piece points towards the broader connections Daze saw between jazz music and his work. Daze noted that painting graffiti on the streets taught him “how to improvise on the spot,” a process of developing the image “as it’s happening, like jazz music.” The central figure’s face, fragmented by blocks of color, points to Daze’s interest in the Cubist portraits of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), which he emulated in pieces titled
“Picassoids.”

Maripol moved from Paris to New York in 1976 with her partner, Edo Bertoglio. They began throwing parties and photographing friends in their apartment and at the club Studio 54. She used an SX-70 Polaroid camera to photograph artists who became emblematic of the time, including Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Madonna, and Andy Warhol. In 1980, she produced the film Downtown 81, which followed Basquiat through vignettes of Lower Manhattan. In 1982, Maripol met Madonna at The Roxy club and became her stylist for the Like a Virgin album. Maripol’s rubber armband jewelry, cross necklaces, and revealing bustiers became defining fashion items for young women of the time.

The Polaroid Madonna “Everybody” features the famed pop singer the year that her debut single “Everybody” was released. Madonna is styled with Maripol’s jewelry, a denim vest, and headband. Other Polaroid images featured in this slideshow depict the famous figures Maripol styled and photographed in her loft. The artist’s Polaroids document the zeitgeist of the New York Downtown scene, capturing young stars in the final moments before their launch into fame.

Born in Puerto Rico, Lee Quiñones grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and became one of the most renowned graffiti artists of the 1970s and 1980s. Between 1974 and 1978, Quiñones painted over 120 whole subway cars, a time-intensive feat that allowed the artist to work in a mural style legible from afar. Quiñones also painted multi-car murals and was a major contributor to one of the first whole trains to run in traffic; some of his painted train cars ran untouched by other graffiti writers for years out of respect for his work. In 1980, Quiñones exhibited in the “Times Square Show” alongside many other artists in this exhibition. The same year, fellow graffiti artist John “Crash” Matos included Quiñones in the exhibition “Graffiti Art Success for America.” He also starred in Charlie Ahearn’s movie Wild Style (1983)—on view at the start of the exhibition—and played a seminal role in bridging divides between pop culture, street art, and fine art.

Quiñones’ drawings on view indicate the planning process that went into subway car murals, or what he called “paintings that ran.” Central to each drawing is an attention to color, composition, and legibility of the image and text from afar. The horizontal format of Lee Lives and Silent Thunder makes them well suited to cover the entire flank of a subway car. Subway Car Montage features designs that would emphasize the motion of the subway car, including horses dashing toward the horizon and an old steam train.

In Lee Font Study #1, the artist styles his moniker with stippled shading and expressive movement.

Edo Bertoglio is a Swiss-born Italian photographer and film director. Bertoglio lived in New York between 1976 and 1990 and worked as a photographer for magazines including Vogue Italia and renowned pop artist Andy Warhol’s Interview. In 1980, Bertoglio and fashion designer Maripol, to whom he was married, began producing a film about the No Wave music scene and the cultural zeitgeist of the Lower East Side. Bertoglio directed the project in 1981, following rising artist Jean-Michel Basquiat around New York as he encounters key figures in the scene and attempts to sell his work. The film was later released in 2000 under the title Downtown 81, a decade after Basquiat’s death.

Walter Steding and the Dragon People depicts musician Walter Steding on violin with his band, the Dragon People, featuring Ruby St. Catherine on bass, Karen Geniece on guitar, and Claudia Summers on Oberheim synthesizer. The band, formed in 1980, released records on Red Star and Animal Records. Andy Warhol became involved with the group as a manager and founded a record label with Steding called Earhole Productions. Bertoglio’s photographs of key figures in the Downtown New York scene brought avant-garde music and art into the spotlight of pop culture and the fashion industry.

Walter Robinson is an artist and art critic whose singular style arose from the fact that in an industry obsessed with good taste, he trained himself to “like things that are bad.” Robinson moved to New York City from Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1968 to attend Columbia University, where he joked that his major was “chasing girls.” In the late 1970s, he began writing about art and painting the pulp romance imagery that defined his career. Robinson was a founding editor of the magazines Art-Rite (1973-1977), and later, Artnet Magazine (1996-2012), published solely on the internet. He returned to exhibiting his work in 2008 after a hiatus that had begun in the late 1980s.

In contrast with what he perceived to be “posing and phoniness” in the avant-garde art of the 1970s and 80s, Robinson began painting the covers of 1940s and 50s pulp romance novels. “They were all about passion and love and romance and drama,” noted Robinson, “and I thought that that was real.” Brats features an embracing couple in a New York nightclub, a subject that Robinson admitted attracted him partially because it gave him “a certain kind of sex appeal” as he forged his own love story.

Robinson painted Vixen on an unstretched drop cloth. At the time, Robinson lived near discount stores where he purchased bedsheets to paint on, which he could easily fold up and exhibit unstretched. Robinson’s paintings reinterpret imagery from popular culture like his contemporaries in the so-called Pictures Generation, such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. Robinson’s paintings, however, are characterized by hot, intimate attachment rather than cool critique.

“I am insistent on not being erased,” said Tabboo! (Stephen Tashjian), a vibrant maximalist in his painting, drag performances, and daily life. “I’m living for all the people who couldn’t,” referring to his coming-of-age in New York amid the AIDS epidemic. Raised in rural New England, north of New York, Tabboo! remembers the day he moved to the city: June 15, 1982. That day, he met fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, upon whose recommendation Tabboo! booked and performed a show at the Pyramid Club that night. Tabboo! continued to perform and paint while working odd jobs, including as a dishwasher, florist, and dancer. His paintings of the city, flowers, and portraits of friends are vignettes of New York as a place that is “beautiful, gay, intense, colorful, and magic.”

Tabboo’s Three Pyramid Figures captures the expressive personalities that frequented the Pyramid Club. The club was founded in 1979 and became an epicenter of New York’s drag and punk scene in the 1980s, as well as a venue for AIDS charity fundraisers attended by famed artists and musicians like Andy Warhol and Madonna. Collaged onto a page to form a motley crew, each of the Pyramid figures shows off their distinct personality through their fashion and cheeky expressions. Fashion is one way that Tabboo! expresses liveliness and perseverance through the hardships faced by the gay community. “People are always asking me,” said the artist, “‘Why are you so dressed up?’ Why? Why? Because it’s today.”

Tseng Kwong Chi was born in Hong Kong and emigrated to Canada with his family in 1966. He studied photography in Paris and moved to New York City in 1978, quickly joining the scene of young artists living and working Downtown. He became a prolific photographer of the Downtown art and music scenes, often appearing in the pictures with his subjects and sometimes posing himself in series of self-portraits. The work that he produced over the course of a decade serves as a social anthropology of New York’s Downtown art scene and mythic monuments of Western culture. Tseng was known, for example, for the 25,000 photographs he took documenting the work of his friend Keith Haring. As a magazine photographer, he also captured other fixtures of the scene, including Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf, as well as celebrities like Andy Warhol, Yves Saint Laurent, and Madonna.

In a series created for the local Soho Weekly News, Tseng Kwong Chi and performance artist Ann Magnuson dressed their friends as mainstream couples and set them against a midcentury backdrop of classic American suburbia. “It’s a Reagan World!” slyly connects the cultural conservatism of the 1980s to that of the post-World War II period of the 1950s. Tseng and Magnuson provided a narrative for the series: “… Having left a decaying urban setting, our youthful couples, exponents of the New Heterosexuality, move into the exciting new world of split-level living. Young America returns to its roots into a land of unrestricted freedom and effort-less fashion…”

Lorraine O’Grady has remarked that the goal of her art is “to remind us that we are all human.” The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, O’Grady’s upbringing was privileged compared to what she described as the “Black working-class culture” of Americans with generational trauma inherited from ancestors forced to work in labor camps. Before becoming an artist at age 45, O’Grady worked as a government analyst, translator, and rock music critic. In 1980, O’Grady began making participatory performances that critiqued the ongoing segregation of the art world and encouraged people of color to recognize their intrinsic value.

Between 1980 and 1983, O’Grady stormed art openings, raging against the racism and misogyny of the mainstream establishment as the fictional character Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, imagined as a 1955 beauty queen. Her dress and cape, made of 180 pairs of white gloves from Manhattan thrift shops, alluded to the “boot-licking” kind of “art with white gloves on” that grew out of a system dominated by white men. In her first performance at Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery in the Downtown neighborhood of Tribeca, O’Grady gave herself 100 lashes with her white “whip-that-made-plantations-move,” a reference to the enslavers of African-Americans. She recited poetry that chastised Black artists who, in her view, had compromised their work to assimilate into this white-dominated scene, yelling, “BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!” Inspired by the futurist idea that art has the power to change the world, O’Grady’s aimed to accelerate integration and equality for Black artists and women.

Sturtevant repeated the works of numerous artists whose styles were broadly recognizable—including Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol—making artistic style itself her medium. The artist moved to New York in the 1950s and made her first repetition in 1964, using the works of Pop artists who had themselves appropriated images from elsewhere. After taking a break from the art world in the late 1970s, Sturtevant returned in 1986 with repetitions of the works of younger artists. To make them convincing, she became a chameleon of technique, mastering painting, photography, sculpture, and film. In the 2000s, the endemic repetition on the Internet brought new attention to Sturtevant’s decades-long exploration of authenticity, originality, and attribution. Speaking on creative gestures in the Internet age, Sturtevant said, “Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine—that’s the way to go.”

When Sturtevant returned to the art world in the mid-1980s, she began with repetitions of Keith Haring’s works. “Every kid with a lollipop knows Haring,” Sturtevant said. By picking artists with recognizable styles for her repetitions, Sturtevant investigated the mechanisms behind the canonization of an artist and their work. Well-versed in postmodern theory, Sturtevant showed that value is not merely derived from the “original” or “singular” styles of the objects she worked with, but rather from the mythos and metanarratives tied to the identities of their makers.

Louise Lawler’s photographs reveal the secret lives of artworks once they leave the artist’s studio. By photographing works of art on location in the collections of private owners, galleries, storage sites, and museums, Lawler demonstrates how the value and interpretation of a work of art depend on the setting and manner in which it is presented. Lawler came to New York in 1969 and took a job at Castelli Gallery, which had a celebrated roster of artists including Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella. Beginning in the late 1970s, Lawler and her contemporaries Sarah Charlesworth, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and Richard Prince were recognized for appropriating images from art history and mass media to critique consumer culture; along with others, they came to be known as the Pictures Generation. Lawler’s career coincided with the rise of the speculative market that saw art as a capital investment. Photographing private collections, she brought works that had disappeared from the public eye back into circulation. Lawler combined this appropriative style with a focus on the art market and institutions that had been pioneered by conceptual artists during the 1960s and 70s.

Lawler took a number of photographs in the Connecticut and New York homes of art collectors Burton and Emily Tremaine before the dispersal of much of their collection at auction. In Monogram, Jasper Johns’ White Flag (1955-58), a version of a work that Johns said was inspired by dreaming of the U.S. flag, hangs above the couple’s monogrammed bedspread. By the time of Lawler’s picture, Johns’ iconic paintings of targets, numbers, and flags had made him one of the most famous artists in America. Capturing the juxtaposition of Johns’ painting with the Tremaines’ upper-class branding, Lawler subtly suggests how some art becomes its own brand and extension of the artist’s identity.

Graffiti artist John “Crash” Matos came of age in the Bronx in the 1960s and 70s reading comic books and watching anime shows like Speed Racer and Kimba the White Lion. At the age of 13, Matos began tagging subway cars in train yards with the name CRASH, a moniker he had taken on when he accidentally crashed his school computer. In 1978, Matos was among the first graffiti artists to start painting on canvas. He began exhibiting his work in galleries alongside contemporaries Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 1981, Matos curated the exhibition “Graffiti Art Success for America” at Fashion Moda gallery, continuing to bridge the street art and fine art worlds. In 1984, Matos collaborated with Keith Haring on a mural for the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

In this work, CRASH fills the canvas with an exclamation of catastrophic impact. Originally painted on the sides of speeding trains, CRASH’s tag would read as a cheeky premonition of an impending collision. On the gallery wall, however, the word takes on the playful punchiness of a comic book frame. Matos noted that although he has worked on different supports—trains, guitars, canvases—he employs text to communicate a deeper message. “We took words and made it into an object,” Matos said of the 1970s and 80s graffiti scene. “The medium is secondary to what you have to say.”

Mike Bidlo is a conceptual artist who combines performance with meticulous studio techniques. Bidlo moved from Chicago to New York in 1980, where he became active in the art scene. In 1982, Bidlo staged the performance Jack the Dripper at Peg’s Place in his studio at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, reenacting the incident when artist Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) urinated into collector Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace. This performance sparked a series of performative recreations of famed works of modern art that were notably faithful to the originals. This gesture of appropriation recontextualizes so-called masterpieces, questioning their putative singular ingenuity and placing them within a long lineage of artists who borrowed and reinvented the imagery and techniques of others.

In Not Pollock, Bidlo takes on the impossible task of replicating Pollock’s legendary Abstract Expressionist paintings, which revolutionized postwar art. His technique of dripping paint in partially controlled gestures onto a canvas may appear unskilled; however, this very randomness makes a Pollock painting impossible to copy, because it would require perfect replication of factors such as paint viscosity, velocity, and force. Not Pollock is part of a series of similar works, the culmination years of practicing the abstract artist’s technique. Between 1983 and 1998, Bidlo recreated seminal works by over a dozen modern and contemporary masters, including Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso.

Ashley Bickerton first became known as part of a movement in New York’s East Village that some critics termed Neo-Geo, which was short for “neo-geometric conceptualism.” The name describes artists whose work criticized modern mechanization and commercialism, and originated from an exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in 1986, featuring Bickerton, Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, and Meyer Vaisman. Neo-Geo artists deployed geometric forms as a metaphor for the “shaping” and artificiality of the modern world. Bickerton moved from New York to Bali in 1993 and has continued to critique issues such as commodification, colonialism, and corruption.

Commercial Piece #1 is part of a series of works Bickerton made in the 1980s that feature various silkscreened logos, including those of commercial companies and brands. Here, the “brands” are powerful entities behind the art industry, including the galleries Leo Castelli and Sonnabend; Paris fashion brands Azzedine Alaïa and Nina Ricci; Swiss and German banks; a logo for Bickerton’s contemporary, Jeff Koons; and the Hotel Macklowe, built in Times Square by a collector and developer. In other “self-portrait” works made during this period, Bickerton developed a personal brand, SUSIE, and placed its logo alongside those of major brands like Nike, Bayer, and Motorola. By branding an object with the names of multiple corporations, artists, or galleries and claiming these objects as his own, Bickerton plays on the concepts of intellectual property and ownership that were key to the debt-fueled, booming U.S. economy of the 1980s.

Gretchen Bender deployed the cutting-edge technologies of her time to critique mass media and corporate-sponsored information. Bender came to New York in 1978, joining contemporaries Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and others in using the forms and content of mass media against itself to expose its underlying cultural conditions. Working in the commercial sphere on music videos, TV shows, and advertisements, Bender saw media as “a cannibalistic river” that lulled viewers into passive “absorbing.” Studying vector graphics and computer animation, Bender acquired a rare skillset that enabled her to program multichannel videos and develop a chaotic, hyper-stimulated aesthetic. The artist’s visually aggressive editing style emphasizes the hopelessness of processing a deluge of information from multiple media streams.

In the series “The Pleasure Is Back,” Bender juxtaposed images taken from the contemporary art of her peers, art historical sources, and television stills. Tiled in the shape of a gridded cross, the combination of these images emphasizes the rapid evolution of media and information dispersal technologies from painting and printmaking to audiovisual formats. Bender noted her desire to “use the art as signs and not as valuable objects,” combining found images “as one combines words in a language or even just parts of an alphabet.” By using images like words, Bender deploys pictures as signs with underlying ideological motivations. This series of images appropriated from a male-dominated art historical canon laid the groundwork for Bender’s later works, where corporate-sponsored moving images compete for the viewer’s attention.

Wild Dead I, II, III (Danceteria Version), shown at the New York City club Danceteria, is set to the kind of experimental cyberpunk music that was being played in clubs at the time. This was Bender’s first work to use multi-channel video. Corporate logos, contemporary paintings, and computer graphics from the New York Institute of Technology flash across the monitors along with snippets of David Cronenberg’s feature film Videodrome (1983). Bender was enchanted by “the way in which TV moves, the current,” and how this movement paradoxically “flattened content” rather than enlivening it. Like the barrage of media from online platforms today, the currents of Wild Dead I, II, III (Danceteria Version) change too quickly to be fully processed. “I’ll mimic the media,” the artist explained, “but I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.

In 1966, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt ran away from home and moved into a USD 35 per month rental apartment in New York. There, he developed a practice of using household items, trash, and dollar-store knickknacks to make opulent constructions and installations. Inspired by queer performances and the aesthetics of his working-class upbringing, Lanigan-Schmidt was an early adopter of kitsch. Between 1969 and 1971, he hosted “situations” in his apartment in which he guided visitors through tinfoil installations in drag as art collector “Ethel Dull,” lampooning Ethel Scull, one of the most famous New York collectors of the 1960s.

In Daphne and Apollo in an American High School Play, Lanigan-Schmidt filters the classic Greek myth through the lens of tacky high school drama costumes. In the myth, Apollo chases after the nymph Daphne, who turns into a tree to escape his pursuit. Green tinsel, imitating both foliage and the glittering costumes of drag queens, tufts Daphne and wraps around the piece. Four minstrel-like figures with ogling eyes, button noses, and white, exaggerated smiles dance around the scene. Crumpled theater gels, used to color stage lights, glimmer like gem stones. Using the materials and imagery of theater, Lanigan-Schmidt trades the emotional drama of the original narrative for performative glamour and adolescent playfulness.

Nam June Paik was one of the first truly transnational artists of the modern era and is internationally recognized as the “Father of Video Art.” Born in Korea, Paik grew up in Japan and moved to Germany in 1956. His first exhibition in 1963 featured altered televisions and radically expanded the possibilities for video in art. He moved to New York in 1964 and kept innovating in his pioneering use of camcorders, video synthesizers, live broadcasting, and other cutting-edge technologies. In 1974, Paik predicted the emergence of the Internet, which he called an “electronic superhighway,” that would be a global network used for communication. Paik hoped that mass media would connect people across the world and encourage greater understanding and cultural collaboration.

Paik painted the striped backgrounds of the two paintings on view to evoke the NTSC color bars. These bars were the standard broadcasting test used in the U.S. from 1954 to the 2000s, allowing engineers to adjust and standardize television color schemes. They were also one of the first electronically produced graphics ever displayed on screen. 2-1=0, with its blurred lines and visible brush strokes, exemplifies the hand-painted practice Paik maintained alongside his futuristic deployment of new technologies. In Untitled (Smaller Rosetta Stone – Channel 12), Paik correctly predicted that television images would become a mode of global communication, or a new “Rosetta Stone,” that transcended language. Here, Paik reduces language to pictograph symbols, including a sun, fish, heart, fruit, airplane, and face. They look surprisingly like emojis, a cell phone communication feature released in Japan in 1999, sixteen years after Paik created this painting. Paik himself spoke an impressive number of languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, and German, and he sometimes mixed them while speaking.

Jenny Holzer works primarily with language, bringing messages into public space through installations, electronic displays, projections, and billboards. Holzer moved to Manhattan in 1976 to join the Whitney Museum of American Art’s independent study program, and she found in her academic readings the source material for the art that she would create over the next two decades. Holzer’s first public work, Truisms (1977-1979), consisted of anonymous one-liners printed on paper that she pasted onto the walls of buildings. She joined the artist coalition Colab—which shared her interest in going beyond traditional gallery spaces—and participated in their landmark 1980 “Times Square Show.” In 1982, Holzer’s first electronic sign was installed in Times Square, utilizing the burgeoning computer technology that would become an essential component of her work. Her LED-strip texts adopt the form and urgent tone of newsreels and stock price lists, but unlike their commercial counterparts, Holzer’s messages reward close reading.

Laments: I am a man... is part of Holzer’s “Laments” series. The texts in this series are spoken from the first person, in which “I” is a deceased individual saying their piece on power and pain. The opening conceit, “I am a man,” is borrowed from a civil rights protest sign carried by striking sanitation workers in 1968. For Black men working under inhumane conditions, the slogan was a demand to be treated with dignity. Holzer appropriates the slogan in the context of feminism, pointing out the ways that men hold power over women. Her phrases are elusive, both fleeting and complex. Holzer notes, “I want the meaning to be available but I also want it sometimes to disappear into fractured reflections... Because one’s focus comes and goes, one’s ability to understand what’s happening ebbs and flows. I like the representation of language to be the same.”

Among the most famous artists who emerged in New York during the 1970s and 1980s, Cindy Sherman is known for her many photographs in which she costumes herself in the guise of stereotypical characters. Sherman moved to New York in 1977 and began working on her famed series “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-1980). In these black and white photographs, she assumes characters and caricatures that evoke promotional film stills from 1950s Hollywood movies. These, and subsequent works from the 1980s, provoked questions about gender, identity, and representation. Sherman’s remixing of mass media forms situates her among what came to be called the Pictures Generation with Sarah Charlesworth, Louise Lawler, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, Laurie Simmons and other artists whose works are also included in the exhibition.

The two photographs on view are from Sherman’s “Disasters” series (1986-1989), which marked a turn in her work from glamorous female archetypes to photographs that reveal the ugly side of humanity. “I’m disgusted with how people get themselves to look beautiful,” said Sherman in 1986, “I’m much more fascinated with the other side.” In this series, the artist began to move away from using herself as a subject, but the pictures that Sherman produced retained the emotional punch of her earlier work. Critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote that these extraordinary images drew from the “dramatizing of individual emotion” that he associated with recent forms of expressionist painting. Untitled #175 appears to picture the residue of some beach party gone bad. Alongside crushed cupcakes and something resembling vomit, Sherman appears in the reflection of the sunglasses, in costume with her mouth agape. A corporate office is the setting for Untitled, and the desiccated remains of the suited professional woman suggests both the Cold War anxiety of atomic annihilation and the specter of AIDS.

Robert Hawkins uses realistic painting to depict narratives of imagined times and places. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, attracted by the counter-cultural punk scene. There, he took up natural subjects, painting the city’s green spaces, waterfronts, and the nearby Yosemite National Park. Hawkins moved to New York in 1978 and found a radically different urban landscape, one overtaken by commercialism and the aesthetic of American late capitalism. In 1980, Hawkins’ work was shown at the Mudd Club, an alternative art space curated by artist Keith Haring, whose works are also included in the exhibition. Hawkins quickly integrated into the Lower East Side art scene. His paintings were among the few respected and collected by his discerning young contemporary, Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In Philosophy, Hawkins’ use of the crown may be viewed as an allegory for the country’s obsession with grandeur and wealth at the time. In the 1980s, U.S. newspapers popularized the concept of American exceptionalism, claiming that the U.S. was culturally and politically unique. Philosophy envisions a future where nature, not nationalism, is the dominant force. New York critic Gary Indiana described how Hawkins “pictures the future in terms of the past.”

David McDermott and Peter McGough are an artist duo known for their anachronistic lifestyles and artworks. They met in New York in 1980 at a theater performance, and that year they began their artistic collaboration and romantic partnership. McDermott and McGough chose to live as if in the Victorian era, wearing top hats and shirking modern technology like television and electric lights. “We were experimenting in time,” noted McDermott, “trying to build an environment and a fantasy we could live and work in.” Although their romantic relationship ended in 1985, the two continued to work together, appropriating images and photographic techniques from the late 1800s to Pop Art.

Viewing the Moon, 1884-1984 was part of the duo’s first solo exhibition, “Meiji Paintings” at North Store Gallery in 1983. The series imitates the style of British orientalist copies of Japanese prints from the Meiji era. McDermott & McGough may have been inspired to focus on the Meiji era in part because Japan was a rising economic power during the 1980s; the Meiji era was marked by modernization and the beginning of Western culture’s influence on Japan.

Nicolas Moufarrege was born in Egypt to Lebanese parents involved in the textile trade. He made his first needlepoint—a patch for his jeans—while in the U.S. working at Harvard University in the late 1960s. He moved back to the Middle East, settling in Beirut and making textile art, but then relocated to Paris during the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. In 1981, Moufarrege moved to New York, where he worked as an artist and critic who brought attention to important galleries and figures of the East Village scene. His striking needlepoint paintings mingle figures from global art history with comic book characters and challenge the hyper-masculine heroes of popular culture and mythology.

Moufarrege’s Worry War Rid presents a sweeping panorama of an imagined landscape of fantastical characters. Spiderman was a recurrent and central figure in Moufarrege’s New York paintings, as the artist felt his practice of needlepoint was similar to Spiderman’s webs. A horse from Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937) and Santa Claus with a sleigh pulled by reindeer flank the Marvel comic hero. Moufarrege used glitter and needlework—materials often associated with femininity—to queer these potent cultural figures. Often highlighting lone characters from Eastern and Western art history, American comics, and other sources, the artist’s works from the 1980s reflect his experiences with geopolitical displacement.

Nancy Spero was an artist and activist whose figural paintings, drawings, and prints express histories that focus on women. Spero grew up and studied in Chicago. She married fellow artist and collaborator Leon Golub in 1950, and the two lived in Italy and Paris together before settling long-term in New York in 1964. Upon Spero’s return to the U.S., she was exposed to broadcast images of the Vietnam War, and her work took a turn towards feminism and anti-violence. She joined the Art Workers Coalition and cofounded A.I.R Gallery, the first independent women’s art venue in the U.S. Spero developed her characteristic scrolls combining text with printed and hand-painted images that commented on the histories of violence and the perseverance of women. Fearless in her pursuit of a visual language that could contain the depth and breadth of women’s experiences, Spero developed a cast of figures drawn from her research into mythology, history, and media. After 1975, Spero worked exclusively with women as the subjects of her art, and in the 1980s, she began printing directly on the walls of museums and public spaces.

In Dancing Totem, Spero repeats a print of a woman outlined from an example she found in Roman pottery. Spero started making print plates of her drawings in the late 1970s to replicate images, and over the following decades, her collection grew to number in the hundreds, forming a visual lexicon of the female form. This vertical scroll depicts playful moments that contrast with the violent, anti-war imagery of some of her other works. “I just didn’t want woman as a victim,” she said, continuing that she enjoyed seeing women start to become “free of all these constraints” she experienced in her life.

Richard Prince moved to New York in 1973, inspired in part by artists such as Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Franz Kline (1910-1962), whom Prince saw as people “content to be alone, pursuing the outside world from the sanctum of [the] studio.” He developed a photographic practice that allowed him to do just that. In his job producing magazine clippings for Time-Life publishing, Prince confronted the staged photographs of advertising images every day. He started re-photographing and manipulating these consumer images for his own artistic ends. Removing corporate logos and cropping images from advertisements, Prince explored the visual structures of power in American capitalism. His re-photographing of extant images situates him alongside Sarah Charlesworth, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and other artists on view in this exhibition who used photography to reveal the visual codes and styles that structured American culture during the 1980s.

In Untitled (three women with their heads cast down), Prince re-photographed black-and-white advertisements of women using color film. By cropping the frame and grouping these women by gesture, he turns a generic image one might glance over into something uncanny. “I seem to go after images that I don’t quite believe,” said Prince, continuing, “I try to re-present them even more unbelievably.” Looking away from the viewer, these women may be deflecting an unwelcome gaze or simply keeping to themselves. In either case, Prince implicates the viewer, the unnamed commercial brands, and the advertisement photographers, as well as himself, in the act of turning these women into demure pictures of femininity that cannot look back.

Arch Connelly came to New York City in 1980 and quickly began showing work in the East Village. He became known for his floor sculptures and wall reliefs bursting with decorative embellishment. Connelly’s flashy materials—such as costume jewelry, glitter, and sequins—contrast with the minimalist movement of the preceding decade. The theatricality and pastiche of Connelly’s textured surfaces borrow from the camp aesthetic of underground ballroom culture, where queer underclass people performed with unapologetic extravagance. His glimmering sculptures celebrate the vivacity and flamboyance of the community before and during the onset of the AIDS epidemic, which took the artist’s life at the age of 43.

Connelly’s seductive Cone evokes the jagged, organic topography of stalagmites rising from a cave. Plastic pearls and fake jewels bulge from the dark ridges, cheaply mimicking natural, slow-formed gemstones. In the words of Connelly’s contemporary Roberto Juarez, his works emerge from a “product reality” in which plastic is “all natural.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat merged the white-dominated contemporary art scene of Downtown New York with the rising rap, hip hop, and graffiti scenes of the city’s uptown. Basquiat grew up in a middle-class Haitian and Puerto Rican American family. In 1976, he befriended graffitist Al Diaz in school, and the two started spray-painting witty phrases on subway trains and city walls under the name SAMO (a shortening of “same old shit”). Basquiat did not finish high school and left home in 1978, planning to “be a star.” The following year, he met fellow street artists Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, who became collaborators. Basquiat’s career began its meteoric rise from the streets to first-tier galleries with the 1980 “Times Square Show” and in 1981’s “New York/New Wave,” a landmark exhibition presented in a converted school called P.S.1. He moved into a building leased by renowned Pop artist Andy Warhol, and the two became close friends and collaborators. As white gallerists encouraged him to create work at a breakneck pace, by the mid-1980s Basquiat worried that he had become a “gallery mascot.” Fame took a toll on Basquiat, and he died at the age of 27.

The intimately scaled works on view showcase Basquiat’s emotional directness. These rarely seen paintings and drawings display the simplicity of the artist’s monochromatic aphorisms as SAMO, his skill as a collagist, and the speed of his graffiti writing. Untitled (Red Face) offers a condensed example of his remarkable calligraphic line, which is also evident in works like Old Tin and Untitled (FOOL ). Basquiat’s terse, recognizable style—one also marked by his interest in art history—enabled him to produce a formidable oeuvre in just ten years, and it remains among the most significant bodies of art created in New York during the 1980s.

Robert Kushner grew up in southern California and moved to New York in 1972. A founding member of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s, Kushner championed decoration as a “defiant declaration.” For Kushner, decoration not only is pleasing to look at but also allows the mind to wander through “expansively and emotionally rich” images. Kushner first traveled to India in 1978, where he learned weaving and a variety of textile techniques from a family of Rajasthani appliqué artists. He has focused on flowers and leaves as his subject matter since the 1980s, and he draws inspiration from West African and Asian textiles, Henri Matisse, and the art of the Middle East, among other sources.

Kushner painted Torrid Dreams on sari cloths that he purchased in India. He used decorative applique stitches to attach different pieces of cloth together, forming an overlapping patchwork canvas. Once assembled, the artist painted the outlines of various figures, matching the palette of his paints to that of the fabrics, creating a dynamic relationship between foreground and background. The bright colors, raw fabric edges, and layers of floral patterns lend the piece the heat and vivacity of a summer day.

Julian Schnabel is an artist and filmmaker who sees surfaces as “opportunities” for painting, “where humanity can take place.” Born in New York City and raised in Texas, Schnabel took his first of many trips through Europe in 1976, where he drew inspiration from canonical Italian painters such as Fra Angelico and Caravaggio. In 1978, Schnabel began painting on canvases covered with broken ceramic dinner plates. This became one of Schnabel’s most recognized techniques and launched his career of painting on appropriated materials, such as tarps, discarded sails, velvet, cardboard, and other supports. In 1981, Schnabel met Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose work hangs nearby and who inspired Schnabel’s first feature-length film, Basquiat (1996).

Schnabel painted the expressive, abstract strokes of Alas over the existing schematic landscape of a kabuki theater backdrop as part of a series in which he used painted sets that had been given to him by a Japanese art dealer. “Using already existing materials,” noted Schnabel, “brings a real place and time into the aesthetic.” Each backdrop carries a unique history, showing signs of wear from past dramas that played out in front of it before the artist reanimated it in a new form. Schnabel’s dramatic, gestural strokes exemplify his leading role in the return of expressionist painting in the U.S. in the 1980s, which had been dominated by more minimal and conceptual styles in the decade prior.

“For me, painting is not intellectual, it’s emotional,” said Joe Overstreet. “I paint things that I think about and feel.” Overstreet’s abstract canvases are imbued with cultural meaning related to his experiences as a Black artist and activist. He moved to New York in 1958 and frequented the Cedar Tavern, a downtown bar popular with artists. There, he found mentors in renowned collage artist Romare Bearden and Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning. Inspired by the shaped canvases of Frank Stella, Overstreet began working outside the rectilinear canvas form in 1967. In 1974, Overstreet, his wife Corrine Jennings, and Samuel C. Floyd established the nonprofit gallery Kenkeleba House in the East Village to support African-American culture, women, and artists who were marginalized by other parts of the New York art scene.

To create this 1982 work, Overstreet first poured paint onto plastic sheets. After the pigment dried, he peeled off layers and glued them onto this shaped canvas in new arrangements. Though the splatters suggest the spontaneity and randomness of action painters like Jackson Pollock, Overstreet’s collage required meticulous precision. This and a series of similar works followed on the heels of the artist’s 1970s “Flight Patterns.” In those paintings—suspended by ropes and stretched by wooden dowels to evoke both kites and tents—“flight” takes on the dual meaning of flying and fleeing. For Overstreet, the tent evokes the provisional shelters of people fleeing enslavement, as well as those of Indigenous peoples in the North American Plains. Overstreet felt a kinship with the flight of marginalized people, noting, “Native Americans, African nomadic people, Black people [in the U.S.] who had no homes ... We had survived with our art by rolling it up and moving it all over… I felt like a nomad myself, with all the insensitivity in America.”

The paintings of Ellsworth Ausby meld the geometry of African aesthetics with hard-edge American painting, characterized by sharp transitions between areas of flat color. Between the 1960s and 1980s, his work transitioned from more figural, totemic forms to geometric abstraction. In the early 1970s, Ausby began exhibiting unstretched canvas works whose arrangements of planar forms hung directly on the white walls of exhibition spaces. In the late 1970s, Ausby received government funding to bring arts programming to under-served communities and began making major public-facing works, such as the multimedia performance InnerSpace/OuterSpace. In 2005, the New York City Transit Authority commissioned Ausby’s stained-glass mural Space Odyssey for a city subway station.

The title of that late mural recalled a series that Ausby began in the late 1970s of the same name. “Space Odyssey” honors Ausby’s connection to the prolific, experimental jazz musician Sun Ra, an early Afrofuturist whose epic oeuvre has been likened to an odyssey. In Space Odyssey (1980), “space” may refer not only to outer space but also to the interrelations between forms on the canvas and the surrounding environment and architecture. Ausby’s “Space Odyssey” paintings deploy a vocabulary of color and form that suggests the patterns and rhythms of music. A horizontal band cuts through the center of the work on view, evoking a musical staff and adding the linear dimension of reading music or narrative to this abstract painting.

Judy Pfaff is celebrated as a painter, printmaker, and innovator of installation art. As a child in London’s low-income East End, Pfaff assembled “raw materials for fantasy buildings” that she collected from abandoned areas of the city, an impulse that carried into her installations with locally salvaged items. While studying at Yale in the early 1970s under the mentorship of the abstract expressionist painter Al Held, Pfaff began to make maximalist work. Viewing traditional and minimalist painting as too restrictive, Pfaff’s final project was an installation. For her 1980 debut exhibition at Holly Solomon Gallery, the artist “wanted to convey a feeling of being immersed, of not being on sure footing.” Her liberal use of color and pattern often draws comparison with the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and 80s, along with artists Arch Connelly, Robert Kushner, and Valerie Jaudon, whose works are also featured in the exhibition.

Pfaff’s Untitled (Shower Curtain) was designed for the bathroom of art dealer Holly Solomon, who supported Pfaff’s aforementioned breakthrough show. Although the work appears to be an explosive riot of color and shape, Pfaff’s constructions are careful rather than improvisational. Trails of blue, green, and orange circles float up the center of the composition like bubbles. Pfaff noted the evolution of these simple “dots” in her work towards more complex concepts, like “cells” and “drops of water.” Circles are a repeated element in Pfaff’s work and often reference the globe, breasts, or mandalas. Here, rippling lines and translucent, overlapping shapes give the effect of looking through a deep underwater space teeming with life.

Rammellzee grew up in the Far Rockaway, Queens neighborhood of New York City, but to those who met him, he seemed to be from another planet. Styling his name as “RAMM-ΣLL-ZΣΣ,” he began tagging train cars on the subway line that ran from his neighborhood to the heart of the Downtown avant-garde scene. Rammellzee became widely recognized through Charlie Ahearn’s film Wild Style (1983), on view at the beginning of this exhibition, and he was friends with (and a sometime collaborator of) fellow artists Dondi, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Futura. As the hip hop and graffiti scenes moved closer to the mainstream, Rammellzee retreated to his home and studio, the “Battlestation,” from which he only emerged in elaborate costumes pulled from his internal universe of characters. For the artist, letters of graffiti could revolutionize the restrictive rules of language and the social hierarchies they enforce. The artist explained, “You think war is always shooting and beating everybody, but no, we had the letters fight for us.”

Calling his aesthetic Gothic Futurism, the artist built a mythological persona buttressed by fantastical costumes and lengthy treatises that combined aspects of physics, astronomy, and references to medieval European culture. He also drew inspiration from China for one of the deities that populated his personal universe, and he took up the I Ching in one of his texts. His abstract paintings suggest the field of that universe, a cosmos of paint splatters, sprayed stencils, and interplanetary ships in battle. The weapons in this battle are not guns, but rather, according to Rammellzee, the stylized forms of graffiti, “armamented for letter racing and galactic battles.” Grounding Rammellzee’s world in the subterranean culture of graffiti, critic Greg Tate noted that the artist demonstrated “a mastery of language and theory about a culture of painting that’d been incubating in caves beneath the big city for a decade.”

Dondi (Donald Joseph) White was an American graffiti artist born in Brooklyn, New York. In the 1970s, White joined several gangs for protection in the context of rising racial tensions in his neighborhood. Through tagging—a form of graffiti by which gangs and individuals paint signatures and informal personal logos to declare their presence in a place—White developed increasingly elaborate styles. Unlike many graffiti artists at the time, White used a version of his real name, putting him at risk of identification and arrest. In 1979, he boldly declared authorship of his pieces by making a work on the roof of his house. In the context of a socio-political system that forced people like White to the margins, presence and pride can be understood as acts of resistance.

Annotate Dominion is written in “wild style,” which is characterized by symbols of movement such as arrows on the ends of overlapping letters. Although White used “wild style” on the streets for the enjoyment of other artists, most of his iconic work was in legible letters directed toward a broad audience. In the early 1980s, White joined the first wave of graffiti artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, who exhibited their work in art galleries. Working on canvas, where there was no contest for prime locations as there was on the streets, White developed his longstanding interest in individuality and personal identity. The title of this work, Annotate Dominion, both nods to graffiti’s origins as a method of marking gang territory and alludes to the expansion of White’s artistic dominion into the above-ground, heretofore gated gallery spaces.

Elizabeth Murray hoped that her paintings, often featuring interiors and items like tables, coffee cups, and shoes, would give viewers the feeling “that there’s somebody home.” While studying in Chicago, Murray fell in love with the paintings of French artist Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), and her aspirations shifted from becoming a commercial cartoonist to being a fine art painter. In the 1970s, Murray began warping and knotting her canvases, treating them like three-dimensional objects. By the 1980s, she was creating shaped canvases of biomorphic, graphic forms colliding in riotous concert. Murray’s paintings incorporate the emotional intensity of 1950s New York Abstract Expressionism with the goofy motion of the Walt Disney comics she had viewed as a child.

In Sentimental Education, three forms on separate shaped stretchers bump into each other. The red axis of the blue form overlaps with its black and yellow neighbors, creating the kind of tension that Murray hoped would allow “conflicting things [to] live together, and not just butt up against each other.” Sentimental Education, like many of the artist’s titles, brings human warmth and narrative to the abstraction. Murray’s interest in the dynamic, “bloopy shapes” of graffiti is evident in this work; the smeared edges of shapes evoke the layering and overlapping of stencils or lettering. “I took things from graffiti,” she explained. “I loved standing at the Franklin Street station and watching those trains go by.”

Futura (Leonard McGurr) has been fascinated by science fiction and advanced technologies from a young age. In the early 1970s, he started tagging subway walls with “Futura 2000,” a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In 1980, his train mural Break, made of atmospheric clouds of red and white, drew attention for its departure from the then-dominant graffiti style of lettering. His abstract work was exhibited at Fun Gallery in the East Village alongside contemporaries Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. After a meteoric rise in the fine art world in the early 1980s, Futura took a decades-long break from the gallery scene, which he felt was “using him” as the token “subway guy.”

The carefully controlled line-work and nebula-like background of Green Arrow showcase Futura’s signature style of abstraction. Using aerosol spray paint, the artist achieves strokes as thin as those made with an airbrush. The stylized circle on the right side of the painting—meant to sketch the orbits of electrons in an atom—became a signature motif in his work and was a potent symbol during the Cold War. The title refers to the DC Comics superhero of the same name, who became popular in the 1960s following a gritty turn in his story arc. After losing his massive fortune, the Green Arrow used his archery skills to become a Robin Hood figure for the working class. Green Arrow merges Futura’s interest in science fiction with a celebration of a character who fought crime and sought justice for the kind of people with whom the artist grew up.