Gallery 98
Browse our selection of over 8,700 items of art ephemera dating from the 1960s to the early 2000s, grouped by artist, gallery, publication, and theme.
https://www.traditionrolex.com/13
- Newsletter Can the discovery of an ancient film made by an extinct tribe of Stone Age women help modern women reclaim their strength and autonomy in a world now dominated by men? That’s the thrust of Cave Girls, a 1981 super 8 film by Kiki Smith and Ellen Cooper that struck such a responsive…
- Newsletter The Gagosian Gallery’s skillful use of promotional ephemera is evident in a 1992-93 series of exhibition announcement cards from a period when Larry Gagosian was just beginning to establish himself at the top of the competitive New York art world. Accompanying this expansion was an aggressive effort to establish a blue-chip roster of both…
- Newsletter Gallery 98 is fortunate to have a large collection of announcement cards and posters from Texas Gallery, an important southwest showcase for advanced contemporary art. We are sorry to hear that the gallery, which opened in the early 1970s, will soon be closing its Houston space and moving exclusively online.
- Newsletter For artists, the final decades of the 20th century were a time of heightened self-awareness, a period when many people began to explore their own lives and find content in issues of personal identity. Accompanying this were demands for political change that soon established the foundations for a new, more multicultural art world with an increased…
- Newsletter In the 1980s culture-loving New Yorkers not only attended gallery openings, theater events and movies, but also participated in New York’s flourishing nightclub scene. While music and dancing were the main attraction, clubs also hosted art exhibitions, performances, fashion, film and video. During these years, almost every gallery opening, film…
- Newsletter There are many reasons to be interested in art ephemera — a type of collectible that has the advantage of being small, easy to store, and modestly priced. Many collectors follow specific artists, while others like to accumulate vintage material connected to a particular art movement or art theme. To help visitors…
- Collections Similar to the way paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat have played a key role in the frenzy surrounding contemporary high-end art auctions, the same is happening in the more limited market of vintage contemporary art ephemera. The cards, posters and publications that feature Basquiat and chart the important moments in his…
- Newsletter The short documentary film that can be viewed below, provides a brief account of Watergate, and the history of courtroom illustration. The film’s highlight. however, is a newly discovered interview with Freda Reiter from the time she was making these drawings. The surprise here is how sympathetic Reiter was towards…
- Newsletter Items of art ephemera, such as announcement cards, posters, press releases, gallery catalogues, low-price multiples, and other art-related items designed primarily for short term use, can tell fascinating stories. This Gallery 98 newsletter features six items that were selected simply because we find them interesting. What you see here is just the tip…
- Newsletter In the 1970s and 80s, Hungarian-born Edit DeAk (née Deák) was an influential artworld participant widely respected as a writer, curator and friend to artists. Her beginnings were in Art-Rite, a low budget magazine that she co-founded and co-edited with Walter Robinson from 1973 through 1978.
- Newsletter Her participation in punk at its most extreme, upended her career in the 1990s, but over the last decade, she successfully reclaimed her place as one of the key artist-photographers of the 1970s and 80s. Her book Punks, Poets & Provocateurs (2015) established her as one of the best portrait…
- Newsletter Art ephemera is primarily a by-product of advertising and promotion. At Gallery 98 our main focus is on exhibition announcement cards and gallery posters, but we also have an interest in the advertisements that galleries place in art magazines. For galleries wanting to advertise, Artforum, with its large international circulation,…
- Collections COLAB’s ever-changing nexus of thirty to sixty artists included many who later achieved individual fame, but the group’s real contribution was the philosophy of creative engagement it advanced through collective, do-it-yourself actions.
- Newsletter It was an art world where originality was prized, and just about anything, in any media, could be considered art. Carson soon established himself as one of the scene’s most extreme artists, a creator of unusual works and performances that even now, fifty years later, stand out for their originality.
- Collections This is a show filled with unusual masterpieces: psychologically-charged drawings that hint at impropriety; ephemera from guerrilla performances staged in Soho galleries without permission; the notorious rectal-realist paintings created with a paintbrush in his behind; and objects connected with ventures like Carson’s LaRocka Modeling Agency and LaRocka Nite Club (later…
- Newsletter There is more to the story of 105 Hudson, however, than its role in the gentrification of TriBeCa. For a brief period in the mid-70s it was the key venue where one could experience the radical changes that influenced the development of art in the late 1970s and 80s. Three…
- Newsletter If you want to own just one item of art ephemera, a good choice might be a gallery invitation featuring a portrait of your favorite artist. This type of card has long been used as a way to advertise exhibitions, especially if the artist is well-known or has a distinctive…
- Newsletter While uptown galleries in wealthy neighborhoods could be intimidating to some, the SoHo galleries with their clean, open spaces seemed welcoming. The appreciation of art, an activity previously reserved for the enjoyment of the elite, now became a popular pastime enjoyed by large, diverse audiences.
- Newsletter Fast, the group exhibition at the Alexander Milliken Gallery, from June 11 to July 15, 1982, is now remembered primarily for its inclusion of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s skull painting (Untitled 1982), which later fetched $110,497,500 at a 2017 auction at Sotheby’s and remains the most expensive of all of Basquiat’s works.
- Newsletter People have many reasons to be interested in art ephemera — a type of collectible that also has the advantage of being small, easy to store, and modestly priced. Many collectors follow specific artists, but others just appreciate catchy images that they can casually display on a bookcase or coffee…
- Newsletter In addition to making the subway chalk drawings that quickly won him fame, Haring also promoted his artistic vision by handing out xeroxes, buttons, posters and stickers featuring his ever-expanding repertoire of images.
- Collections For Keith Haring the line separating fine art and ephemera was thin. His meteoritic career was marked by an unrelenting succession of works cutting across every medium and category of art, but his approach to making art was remarkably consistent whether he was making a large outdoor mural, a commercial…
- Newsletter Gallery 98 spotlights four 1980s galleries with exceptional exhibition records. Of the four, 303 Gallery, which recently celebrated its 35th anniversary, is the only one to have survived the decade. The history of these groundbreaking galleries can be tracked through the art ephemera they produced for each of their exhibitions.
- Newsletter Gallery 98 has always been particularly strong in 1970’s and 80’s art ephemera from downtown NYC. Featured below are items from ABC No Rio’s first five years. This was the time when the gallery was affiliated with the artist group COLAB, and was central to an evolving art world that put a premium on art connected to social and…
- Newsletter In the 1980s culture-loving New Yorkers not only attended gallery openings, theater events and movies, but also participated in New York’s flourishing nightclub scene. While music and dancing were the main attraction, clubs also hosted art exhibitions, performances, fashion, film and video. During these years, almost every gallery opening, film…
- Newsletter Five years after they were first publicly exhibited, Curt Hoppe’s Downtown Portraits (all painted between 2010 and 2019) feel very different from how they felt before. While this collection of 25 larger-than-life, acrylic on canvas portraits will continue to be perceived by most viewers as a celebration of downtown culture in the 1970s,…
- Newsletter What makes for a collectible gallery announcement card? The key quality is a powerful iconic image by a well-known artist that evokes the concerns of the particular time the exhibition took place. Lyle Ashton Harris’ 1997 invitation card clearly fits the bill with its compelling picture of two sexually ambiguous black youths from his White Face Series. It perfectly…
- Newsletter Posters inexpensively printed on offset presses have always been popular with art enthusiasts. Most of these posters were created by galleries and museums to advertise exhibitions. Some, on the other hand, were designed specifically to be sold in museum shops and poster stores as an affordable alternative to signed…
- Newsletter While few of these films were commercial successes, they provide a glimpse of the passions that fueled the East Village art scene during a creative highpoint. These low-budget, Super-8 productions embody the period’s do-it-yourself ethos, as well as, the fusion of art, music and club culture that animated the downtown…
- Newsletter The rapid growth of the city’s non-profit art spaces was rooted in a shortage of galleries and other exhibition venues. But there was also an emerging political awareness that some groups were being systematically excluded from mainstream art. Fortuitously, newly available government funding for the arts happily coincided with a…
- Collections Colette worked without inhibition. Acting out an inner-world of fantasies she began making photographic self-portraits, creating soft fabric environments in which she was often a crucial living presence, and exhibiting self-referential hybrid works that combined sculpture, painting, and photography.
- Newsletter There are many reasons to be interested in art ephemera — a type of collectible that has the advantage of being small, easy to store, and modestly priced. Many collectors follow specific artists, while others appreciate catchy images that they can casually display on a bookcase or coffee tape.
- Newsletter The 1988 announcement card from a Metro Pictures exhibition featuring eleven successful women artists illustrates the gender diversification that was slowly taking hold in the art world in the 1980s. This demographic shift was especially noticeable amongst the artists associated with the then still unnamed “Pictures Generation” art movement which…
- Newsletter Selling Polaroids is a picture book for many audiences. Drinkers and dive-bar aficionados will certainly be pleased. But it is also for fans of Amsterdam and the libertine spirit that the city continues to embody today. Mostly though, it is a book celebrating the freewheeling lifestyle that artists enjoyed in the late 1970s and early 80s, a…
- Newsletter This week’s newsletter features an eclectic group of items. The artists created in a range of styles — expressionism, pop, no wave, cartoon satire, and photo journalism. There is also a wide range in what we identify as art ephemera, including familiar formats like announcement cards and press releases, as well as artist books, artist-designed advertisements, an…
- Newsletter For those interested in the history of art, the cards, posters and catalogs created in conjunction with past exhibitions provide a way to relive the art experience as it originally unfolded. These vintage collectibles not only provide documentation of specific art-world events, they also contextualize art in the social and commercial structure that gives art its fullest…