CategoriesStyles and Movements
East Village Art
The downtown New York scene of the early and mid-1980s, when artists showed brash, mostly figurative work in clubs, storefronts and on the street.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for East Village Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
In the early 1980s cheap rents drew young artists, musicians and performers to the tenement blocks of New York's East Village. Clubs such as Club 57 and the Mudd Club doubled as places to show and perform, and dozens of small, often artist-run storefront spaces opened from 1981. The work was mostly figurative, fast and irreverent, a sharp turn from the Minimalism and Conceptual art of the 1970s.
Keith Haring chalked his radiant babies and barking dogs onto blank black advertising panels in subway stations. Kenny Scharf painted cartoon characters and customised appliances in fluorescent colour. Jean-Michel Basquiat, who had written the SAMO© graffiti with Al Diaz, moved into painting. David Wojnarowicz made stencils, paintings and photographs about sexuality, violence and, later, AIDS, and Martin Wong painted the bricks and residents of the Lower East Side. By the later 1980s rising rents and the AIDS crisis had dispersed the scene.
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