Inventing Downtown

"Have a hefty helping--which means take some time with this show (or, if you can't make it to the Grey Gallery, the beautiful, readable catalog). It's worth it." -The Wall Street Journal "The final success of this exhibition (and the accompanying catalogue, which is a feat of rigorous scholarship) is to chart this history between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism and Pop." -The Art Newspaper "Rachleff deserves our thanks for amassing a wide and wild range of material, from art works to documentary photographs to gallery ephemera...Driven by curiosity, this is curatorial practice at its best." -Hyperallergic "As worthy of attention as the exhibition is the substantial book Rachleff has written to accompany it, which provides a comprehensive and in-depth essay on the history of these galleries, and which is a far cry from the standard exhibition catalogs being produced by many museums these days, whose physical heft belies the fact that their texts consist of bundled short articles. (MoMA, I'm looking at you.) Both the book and the densely hung rooms at the Grey, which are full of paintings, sculptures, and drawings by artists who exhibited in these improvised galleries, offer a useful corrective to the oversimplified art-historical narratives on which we all too often rely unthinkingly." -The Nation "Inventing Downtown, tells the story of that lost chapter, the upstart gallery scene that flourished for more than a decade in the East Village, bequeathing a body of work that considerably scrambles not only the map but also the lock-step narrative of 20th-century art movements." -The New York Times "It's moving, really, to see virtually all the contemporary art modes that would become mainstream by the mid-nineteen-sixties being adumbrated in these tiny gallery spaces ten years earlier: Pop, Minimalism, performance, Conceptual art, poster art, political art, found art. And that art, the art of the mid-sixties, is basically the ground from which contemporary art still grows." -The New Yorker "Melissa Rachleff, the show's curator and author of its exceptional catalog, gives us a rare presentation of the robust roots of art-making, rather than only the flowers." -The New York Review of Books