In 1980s New York, artists produced work from the front lines of an embattled social landscape marked by urban desolation, financial precarity, and the AIDS epidemic. As these adversities ravaged communities, the artists in this gallery harnessed the energy of the city to resist the disenfranchisement they faced. Martin Wong, for instance, painted shuttered shop fronts on the Lower East Side “to focus in close on some of the endless layers of conflict and confinement that have us all bound together in this life.”
Recalling a moment when many lives were lost and entire neighborhoods were razed, the works on view conjure the eloquent rage of a generation of artists who lived, to quote artist David Wojnarowicz, “in the shadow of the American dream.”
Organized by Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator, Department of Film, with Abby Hermosilla, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Curatorial Affairs.
