In connection with Gallery 516: The Artists of Coenties Slip, join composer Duncan Youngerman, photographer Barbara Mensch, and art historian Jonathan D. Katz as they uncover and explore connections between a downtown New York neighborhood and the boundary-breaking artists who made it their creative home.
For a brief period in the 1950s and 1960s, a group of artists—including Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, Delphine Seyrig, and Jack Youngerman—lived and worked together on the southeastern tip of Manhattan. Even as they developed a diverse set of practices, they shared a unique neighborhood that informed their work and fostered a supportive community. Together with the gallery’s organizers, Samantha Friedman, curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints, and Prudence Peiffer, MoMA’s director of Content and author of The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, our speakers will illuminate this history and how it relates to urban renewal, the formation and maintenance of an artist community, and how “collective solitude” can provide a fertile ground for artistic exploration.
Presenters
Composer Duncan Youngerman was born in Paris in 1956. Raised among the pioneering Coenties Slip artistic community by his parents—American painter Jack Youngerman and French actress Delphine Seyrig—he offers a rare and intimate connection to that iconic time and place. His music has been performed worldwide by Ensemble Modern, Asko Ensemble, Joan Jeanrenaud, Arte Quartet, Masataka Hirano, and Vienna Saxophonic Orchestra, among others. He has lived in southwest France for the past 30 years with his wife and four children. He is currently at work on a biography of Delphine Seyrig.
“Out of the way and off the beaten path” was how Barbara Mensch, then a young artist, described her maritime loft in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. During the early 1980s Mensch, who was living in Soho, migrated south of Canal Street seeking an inexpensive place to live and work. Her widely regarded images have been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including at MoMA PS1, the Los Angeles Institute of Art, the Museum of The City of New York, Photokina, and many others. Mensch has published several books on New York’s legendary Fulton Market and downtown neighborhoods, including South Street (2007) In The Shadow Of Genius (2018), and A Falling Off Place: The Transformation of Lower Manhattan (2023).
Jonathan D. Katz is an art historian, curator, and queer activist. A professor of practice in art history and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Katz has curated many exhibitions, nationally and internationally, including Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, which won several national and international best exhibition and book awards. The first full-time academic in the US to be tenured in what was then called lesbian and gay studies, Katz was also the founding director of Yale University’s lesbian and gay studies program, the first in the Ivy League. An activist academic, he also founded the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association, cofounded Queer Nation, San Francisco, and cofounded the organization that successfully lobbied for queer anti-discrimination statutes in Chicago. He also is the president emeritus of the Leslie Lohman Museum for queer art in New York.
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