NYU - New York University
03/31/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 03/31/2025 08:25
NYU Kimmel Windows Gallery Highlights Legacy of New York City’s Dynamic ‘Downtown’
New York University Kimmel Windows Gallery presents an exhibition of archival materials that illustrate the uniquely vibrant community of artists who energized the city's downtown neighborhood between SoHo and the Lower East Side. To Belong, to Survive: Legacies of Downtown New York runs April 5-September 14, 2025 in the public art space along West 3rd Street and LaGuardia Place in Greenwich Village.
The free, outdoor exhibition features 40 objects from the Downtown Collection at NYU's Fales Library and Special Collections. Posters, pamphlets, photographs, sketches, and ephemera are arranged in three groups to illustrate the energy and legacy of the famous neighborhood.
To Belong, to Survive highlights the ways artists and innovators made space for each other, acted collectively despite their dissenting opinions and artistic styles, and fostered a scrappy, DIY approach to both their art and their community, says Ilk Yasha, an adjunct professor who worked with 12 museum studies graduate students to create the exhibition.
"Downtown New York was marked by a shared ethos of experimentation, interrelation, and self-reliance. The collective struggle and passion of the artists and residents directly influenced the visual, communal, and creative work that emerged," Yasha says.
"Another thing the show is thinking about is how timeless this is," he adds. "It was a moment of economic precarity, political instability, and cultural upheaval-much like the moment we're in now."
Among the exhibition highlights are posters of productions by the New York Feminist Theater Troupe; slide sets offered by A.I.R. Gallery of "Feminist Icons of the 70s" featuring such renowned artists as Louise Bourgeois, Barbara Kruger, Grace Hartigan, Jenny Holzer, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Faith Ringgold, and Cindy Sherman; and covers and stories from Upfront, a publication of political art.
A poster illustrates the creativity and community spirit of the Downtown scene.
Another important piece is a sketch by Chinese-American painter Martin Wong featuring a poem written by Miguel Piñero, the Puerto Rican-born founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café.
"They were collaborators and lovers and this item represents both the poetic and the personal," Yasha explains. "It tells the unique story of downtown, this fringe, do-it-yourself, egalitarian space whose legacy lives on."
To Belong, to Survive is the culmination of a new graduate course, "Curating from Archives," that draws on the Fales's renowned Downtown Collection. Students engage methodically with primary materials and shape them into what Yasha describes as "a very New York story." The course also asked students to consider the power of archives to surface untold stories and to reimagine the past.
The course, and the resulting exhibition, are a love letter to the Fales, he adds.
"We're in an era of digital scrolling, so it's really nice to look at paper documents, even if they're reproductions," Yasha says.
The free exhibition is presented in 13 large ground-floor windows along West 3rd Street and LaGuardia Place that are viewable every hour of every day.
About NYU Kimmel Windows | Art in Public Places
Kimmel Windows (founded in 2003) is located on LaGuardia Place and West 3rd Street just one block south of iconic Washington Square Park. The Windows exist as a unique cultural destination at the heart of New York University in historic Greenwich Village, providing space for exemplary public exhibits. The Windows operate under the umbrella of the Provost's office, at the heart of NYU's Art in Public Places initiative which facilitates the display of art in outdoor spaces around campus.