Collection: Downtown New York

Publications, exhibition catalogues, artists’ books, and printed matter connected to the downtown New York art scene — principally the East Village, SoHo, and Lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s.

The objects gathered here document a period when art, nightlife, real estate, youth culture, and market formation briefly occupied the same paper field: gallery guides, scene directories, exhibition catalogues, fanzines, artist publications, and social documents from a short-lived but intensely productive cultural economy. Basquiat, Haring, Koons, Sherman, Prince, Scharf, and their adjacencies appear through the printed matter that recorded, promoted, and helped produce their visibility.

Browse the collection at The New Rare.