Contemporary Art in New York City: 1968-

Between 1968 and 1983, New York City was radically transformed by mass social movements on the one hand, and the forces of Wall Street and real estate development on the other. Across the underground, SoHo lofts, and corporate boardrooms, artists learned to move, and if needed, hustle, to negotiate an urban environment that was not only rapidly changing but increasingly governed by market speculation. Starting with the social uprisings of 1968, we explore how canonized figures such as Donald Judd and Martha Rosler, alongside avant-garde artists Faith Ringgold, Melvin Edwards, and Juan Downey, whose innovations only belatedly received due recognition, broke with artistic traditions. Turning to everyday domestic goods, textiles, barbed wire, and Portapak video, these artists dismantled traditional objects and institutions while founding alternative, artist-run spaces and activist spaces. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, art in New York was radically transformed by an influx of finance. Downtown dealers Mary Boone and Leo Castelli manufactured an art boom through speculative wait lists, and the enterprises of art stars Andy Warhol and Julian Schnabel thrived. Others lampooned the market-driven mutations of art, as seen in Lynda Benglis’s 1974 erotic interventions in Artforum magazine, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s critiques of white patronage, and Barnard alumna Laurie Anderson’s parody of televisual spectacle in O Superman (1981). We also explore other Barnard and Columbia alumnae, including Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her retooling of unpaid domestic labor, and Joan Jonas’s deconstructions of commercialized femininity. The course concludes in 1983 with the opening of Trump Tower and the simultaneous explosion of East Village galleries–and a critical reflection on how the legacies of these decades continue to shape the contemporary art of New York. In class discussion sections offer students close engagement with the course’s artworks in New York’s art institutions and through archives, spanning performance documentation, artists’ zines, magazines, and exhibition ephemera.