Stephan erased my confusion. Seated on one of "100 Chairs in 100 Days" by Martino Gamper, a Vienna-trained designer-artist, the young art director said the exhibit of mixed media and wearable art by international artists launched The Crown Jewels, a collaboration of three local galleries. The project is one of many underway as the center of New York's ever-moving art scene changes again. Salon 94 Freemans is one of a dozen galleries that opened on the Lower East Side last year.
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, at 235 Bowery, opened Dec. 1. For 30 years, the New Museum, as it's known, was a transient resident of adjacent SoHo, housed in one old building after another. Now in its first permanent home, it lives on the edge of fabled, intersecting neighborhoods: Little Italy, the East Village, Greenwich Village, Chinatown, NoHo, SoHo, and the Lower East Side, which already has a hot late-night bar and restaurant scene. It's all made for walking, with distinctly different communities, home to ethnic restaurants, markets, and festivals.
"We were looking for space to pursue creative exhibitions and found this one by luck," said Stephan, 33, who grew up in Switzerland. The short alley has two other occupants, Freemans Sporting Club, which combines handmade menswear and a vintage barber shop, and Freemans Restaurant, an excellent tavern with rustic urban decor. "Our idea was to be close to a larger public and more artists. Even though New York artists now live in Queens and in Red Hook, Bed-Stuy, and other parts of Brooklyn, many still have studios on the Bowery, where they've been ever since Roy Lichtenstein had one here."
Lichtenstein, the late Pop Art painter, moved in 1965 to a former Bowery warehouse and bank that became his studio for several years. Warehouses in SoHo back then offered cheap rent much like tenements on the Lower East Side do now. Through the 1980s and early '90s, SoHo was the heart of New York's art world until gentrification, national retail chains, and skyrocketing real estate prices sent artist studios and galleries packing, first to neighboring Chelsea, then to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where the story repeated.
