FASHION MODAFASHION MODA
Introduction
It is appropriate that this essay appear on the Internet since Fashion Moda,
according to its founder Stefan Eins, is not an art gallery but "a
collection of science, invention, technology, art and fantasy".1 Eins
was prescient since our experience of art on the Internet is just that--a
meeting of science, technology, art, and fantasy. What Fashion Moda became,
however, and the history it made, is a different story, one that more closely
parallels contemporary developments in the downtown art world during the
early 1980s. By telling the history of this Bronx-based art space where
a group of young, white artists from downtown interacted with the community,
using technologies not known 20 years ago we restore and further Fashion
Moda's original philosophy and purpose.
Fashion Moda was one of several Bronx-based arts organizations that during
the 1960s and 1970s acknowledged and embraced the artistic contribution
of the new immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, and the American
South who had replaced an early population of immigrants, mostly European,
from Manhattan's Lower East Side. It was Fashion Moda in particular that
celebrated the street life of its neighbors in exhibitions of graffiti art
and performances of hip-hop music and break dancing. During the 1980s the
message of these vernacular art forms was transmitted to Soho, the East
Village, and internationally to exhibitions such as Documenta in Kassel,
Germany. The influence of all three--graffiti, breaking dancing and rap
music--on American culture today can hardly be overestimated.
While others have chronicled the spread of this influence, there is no history
of that moment in time when art born of the streets was absorbed into the
larger culture. This transition was effected, in part, by a group of artists
associated with Fashion Moda. The documentary history which follows is neither
conclusive nor complete since Fashion Moda's story does not reside in dusty
archives but in the memories of its participants. Many of them have been
contacted and those that who responded have contributed greatly to this
project.
The Bronx
When Fashion Moda opened in 1979, the area called the South Bronx had become
a world-wide symbol of urban blight. Many have attributed its decline to
the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway during the late 1940s and
early 1950s when much of the housing of the area was condemned, virtually
destroying a community striving to redefine itself during the Post-War building
boom. The deterioration of the South Bronx is also tied to the construction
of Co-op City in the northeastern part of the borough, a large-scale building
complex which attracted many from the railroad flats or tenements which
characterized the building stock from the turn of the century when the Bronx
was first developed. Soon the community was beset by seemingly intractable
social problems--drugs, poor schools, and a large welfare roll--and by the
late 1960s and early 1970s this part of the Bronx came to symbolize all
that was wrong with urban America. Both Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald
Reagan made historic stops there calling for programs and financing to help
the citizenry and halt urban decay. In contrast to the efforts of the politicians,
which were deemed opportunistic, a number of Bronx citizens worked hard
to commemorate and further the culture of the borough as it tried to renew
itself.
When the Bronx Council on the Arts appeared on the scene in 1962, it was
like the first crocus of spring after a harsh winter. Dedicated to nurturing
the cultural development of the Bronx, it provided financial support to
local artists and non-profit community arts organizations. In 1980 it established
Longwood Art Gallery in an abandoned school building, P.S. 39, at 965 Longwood
Avenue where today, in addition to a gallery, it maintains studio space
for artists. Three artists in particular who have been associated with Longwood,
Pepón Osorio, Tim Rollins, and Fred Wilson (who was director of Longwood
from its opening in 1985 to 1992) have gone on to international careers.
Further evidence of cultural renewal was the creation of the Bronx Museum
of the Arts in 1972. Located originally in the Bronx County building at
161st Street and the Grand Concourse, it moved in 1988 into its new facility
a few blocks further north at E.165th and the Grand Concourse. Today its
dedicated staff continues the celebration of the visual arts with professionally
organized exhibits of artists from the community and beyond, and a popular
arts education program for local school children.
Other signs of new cultural life were the public art projects which began
to appear in the early 1980s. These efforts were documented in the Lehman
College Art Gallery's recent exhibition "Public Art in the Bronx"
in which nearly fifty new projects were documented for new public schools
and colleges, libraries, parks, and subway stations.
In addition, and bringing us closer to the subject of this essay, was the
presence of several artists from downtown who made the Bronx their home
both literally and professionally. These include John Ahearn who, with Rigoberto
Torres, spent a number of years commemorating his neighbors in distinctive
painted plaster casts some of which now adorn building walls in the Banana
Kelly area. Tim Rollins also joined forces with students from the Bronx
and established KOS or Kids of Survival, a quasi art school called the Art
and Knowledge Workshop that created collaborative projects that have been
exhibited world wide. Finally, there is Stefan Eins, the founder of Fashion
Moda which was, and still is in Eins' mind, a world-wide arts organization
with a storefront location in the South Bronx.
Fashion Moda
In its Bronx manifestation, Fashion Moda was located during the late seventies
and eighties at 2803 Third Avenue near 147th Street and the Hub, the South
Bronx's shopping center. Never designed as a conventional community art
gallery, it functioned more like a happening, those celebrated, anarchic
events of the early 1960s when artists and audience alike participated in
the creation of outrageous and unrehearsed performances. Similarly at Fashion
Moda, with the synergy created by artists from downtown and from nearby
hanging out together, ideas for exhibitions and events emerged spontaneously.
Eins, as he says, was dedicated to creating an environment in which "'community
people can display their art work in a gallery setting that is a dynamic
living enterprise.'" He and other artists from Manhattan were motivated
by a desire to create an art environment that was collaborative, collective,
cooperative, and communal. As Eins saw it, the gallery was "'a means
of communication beyond ideology.'" It connected "'the street...with
the international art world. It open[ed] the door to everyone.'" Surprisingly,
to those not familiar with the ways in which recent art movements function
and flourish, and given Fashion Moda's location in the South Bronx of the
late 1970s, its success within the larger New York and international art
world was amazing and immediate. Its impact on the Bronx, however, is much
harder to gauge.
In the beginning, however, before Fashion Moda became associated with graffiti,
hip-hop and the punk culture of the East Village, its earliest exhibitions
of holograms and of materials related to extraterrestrials more nearly reflected
Eins' stated philosophy to fuse science, technology and fantasy. These were
not, however, the exhibitions which attracted the Manhattan critics. Instead
it was the participation of several young, downtown artists including Jenny
Holzer, John Ahearn, Christy Rupp, David Wells, Justen Ladda, Charles Ahearn,
Jane Dickson, and Rebecca Howland who brought it to prominence.
Six months after it opened, Holzer created for Fashion Moda's facade, one
of her earliest public text pieces called Sentence Philosophy, part of her
Truisms series. Accompanied by audio tapes, large color photostats were
fastened to the windows with lists, in English and Spanish, of her now familiar
aphorisms. Also in spring 1979, John Ahearn did face castings of local South
Bronx residents as a form of outdoor performance art. While throughout the
year there were on-going concerts and performances: some by Bronx-based
rappers like the Wicked Wizards, others by musicians from downtown. That
summer, having met and employed as co-directors Joe Lewis (who also served
as national director from 1980-82) and William Scott, a local teen-ager,
Fashion Moda presented several summer shows including photographs of jazz
musicians by Ray Ross called "The Face of Jazz" and a David Wells
piece called Inventions.
Eins, also an artist, as well as entrepreneur, was born in Austria. He emigrated
to the United States in the late 1960s and settled in Soho near Chinatown
at 3 Mercer Street. During the 1970s he lived in this storefront building
and exhibited his own work and that of artist friends. Called the Mercer
Street Store it was similar in function and informality to the artist-run
galleries which had been a fixture of the downtown art world of New York
since the 1950s.
The 1970s were also a time when non-commercial art galleries, which came
to be called artists or alternative spaces, played an important role in
the flowering of contemporary art in New York, particularly in lower Manhattan.
The lead was taken in 1971 by the Committee for the Visual Arts, founded
to serve the "non-traditional arts community of New York State".
Composed of like-minded artists, critics, administrators, and academics,
and aided in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and
the New York State Council on the Arts, the Committee established Artists
Space a not-for-profit art gallery. Its first location was a floor above
the Paula Cooper Gallery on the corner of Wooster and Houston Streets; later
it occupied several sites in Tribeca. In a short time a number of other
groups emerged, no two alike. The Kitchen Center for Video and Music, founded
in 1971, moved to Soho in 1974 where, as its expanded title indicates, became
a center for video, new music, dance, and performance art. Creative Time,
established in 1973 worked with artists to find abandoned or under utilized
spaces for the placement of sculpture and site-specific work. Their best
known endeavors were the sponsorship of temporary sculpture installations
called "Art on the Beach" which took place on the landfill of
what is now Battery Park City. The Alternative Museum under the leadership
of Geno Rodriguez has for 20 years worked successfully to create an important
and supportive environment for minority and third-world artists. In addition,
there were the artist-run galleries such as A.I.R., the first women's cooperative
gallery, SOHO 20 and 55 Mercer. Of this group, however, and the one that
may have been a precedent for Fashion Moda in terms of exhibiting policies,
was the Institute for Art and Urban Resources or P.S. 1 in Long Island City.
Its inaugural show was titled "Rooms" and was the brain child
of its director Alanna Heiss who invited a large contingent of artists to
tour the space of an 100-year old abandoned public school building, pick
a location and design a work for it. When it opened June 1976, it became
one of the most important showcases for sculptors and artists working with
installations and site-specific projects, a grand collaboration among the
decade's leading new generation of artists: Robert Ryman, Howardena Pindell,
Walter de Maria, Stephen Antonakos, Judy Rifka, Gordon Matta-Clark, Stefan
Eins, Richard Artschwager, Scott Burton, Mary Miss, John Baldessari, Jennifer
Bartlett, Judy Shea, Nam June Paik, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Carl Andre,
Charles Simonds, Vito Acconci, Michelle Stuart, and Joseph Kosuth.
By 1979, and indicative of the rapid generational turnover in the contemporary
art world, a number of the artists involved with P.S. 1 had established
large careers and had had their work included in such prestigious venues
as the Whitney Biennial. Yet when a new crowd of younger artists arrived
in town anxious to make their mark in the burgeoning downtown scene, more
seemed to be at stake than generational discontent. The younger artists,
in from RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) and moving slightly downtown
from SVA (School of Visual Arts), were social activists who disdained the
cool anonymity of conceptual art and minimalism, and no longer believed
that art or art making was a disinterested, intellectualized process. They
distrusted the established museums, galleries and even the newly formed
alternative spaces. It was also tough to find a place to live and residential
outposts were established in the East Village and the lower East Side. Here,
particularly for those on the lower East Side, art and life merged as these
artists joined together to form a coalition called Collaborative Projects,
or Colab. Founded in March 1977, the organizers wanted "to create a
socio-political aesthetic discourse in various communities and provide themselves
as artists with facilities, services, information and finances to develop
their projects."
Such were the ambitions which Stefan Eins brought to the South Bronx when
he migrated there and founded Fashion Moda in an abandoned store formerly
used by the Salvation Army. Not long after Colab, inspired by the Bronx-based
gallery's commitment to interacting with local residents, undertook a broad
range of exhibitions and performances that culminated in the notorious Real
Estate Show. Out of frustration with the City's housing policies, along
with a high sense of outrageousness, a group of lower East Side artists,
some associated with Colab, took over an abandoned, city-owned building
on Delancy Street. Here they put on the visually cacophonous and overtly
political Real Estate Show in which art was made from or inspired by the
detritus of the building and its surroundings.
Wishing to expand the audience for their protests, which varied from an
adolescent desire to act out to the idealism of creating art for social
change, two of the artist-members of Colab, Tom Otterness and John Ahearn,
helped organize the artist-invite-artist exhibit in an abandoned tenement
in Times Square at 41st Street and Seventh Avenue. As described by the writer
Jeffrey Deitch the Times Square show was "a month-long party, business
enterprise and loosely curated exhibition of art, film, fashion and exotica....
with a startling variety of paintings, peep shows, sculpture, statues, model
rooms, bundled clothing and even a punching bag set up for practice".
Covered extensively by the Village Voice, the Soho Weekly News, and the
East Village Eye, the Times Square show rated feature-length articles in
all the art press. Art on the margins had come to the center.
Earlier, Fashion Moda had attracted similar notice and the first critic
to write at length on their efforts was Lucy Lippard who connected the desire
to create the Real Estate show to the same impulse which spawned Fashion
Moda. Writing in the short-lived Seven Days, she included a quote from the
Real Estate's show manifesto noting that for both the Colab artists and
for Eins it was important to bridge the "'gap between artists and working
people by putting art on a boulevard level'". In the Bronx Lippard
found that Fashion Moda was not defined "by art nor by do-goodism.
Its success stems from a genuine mesh of its own interests and those of
its audience, and it avoids 'cultural imperialism' by respecting itself
as well as its audience". She also remarked that Ahearn's plaster casts
had become "the most popular art ever shown at Fashion Moda."
It is through the person of Ahearn, in particular, that the fortunes of
Fashion Moda and the artists of the Lower East Side begin to merge for the
year before the Times Square show Ahearn created a sensation with his exhibition
of painted plaster casts of local Bronx neighbors and turned the casting
process into an outdoor performance. The exhibition of nearly 40 of these
casts at Fashion Moda in Spring 1979 helped put the new gallery on the map.
It didn't hurt when Walter Robinson, writing about the exhibition in Art
in America, linked Ahearn's work to the work of Duane Hanson, John de Andrea,
George Segal and Robert Graham.
That first year other artists from Colab exhibited at Fashion Moda including
Christy Rupp who, in the fall of 1979, inaugurated her art education program
"Animals Living in Cities" as part of her City Wildlife Projects.
Part educational, part political and certainly iconoclastic, the presentation
involved the combined effort of artists and scientists to introduce South
Bronx school children to the city's wildlife--ants, spiders, roaches and
rats.
In the spring the Ladies Auxiliary Wrestling Team performed and Charles
Ahearn showed his film the Deadly Art of Survival. That summer, in addition
to a performances by the Relentless Blues Band, Haim Steinbach exhibited
a work called Changing Displays, and in the fall Jane Dickson created her
City Maze.
Today, however, Fashion Moda is most often associated with graffiti art
and its acceptance into the art world through such figures as John Fekner,
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, and Keith Haring. Its first graffiti
show was in the fall of 1980. Curated by Crash, a 19-year-old graffiti artist,
invited eleven of his friends most of whom were black and Puerto Rican.
One exception was Lady Pink, a woman, who would go on to collaborate a few
years later with Jenny Holzer. The works, either spray canned directly on
the walls or on canvas, ranged from blown-up tags to full narratives and
included works by: MITCH, KEL, 139TH, DISCO 107.5, FUTURA, ALI, ZEPHYR,
as well as CRASH and LADY PINK. It also included the work of John Fekner
whose stenciled admonitions became famous following an 1979 visit of Ronald
Reagan to the South Bronx. Earlier Fekner had written the phrases "Broken
Promises" and "Decay" on exposed walls which provided the
backdrop for a Reagan press conference. The exhibition's success was due
in part to the encouragement of Eins and Lewis who had issued an on-going
invitation to local graffiti or street artists to sign the walls of the
back room at Fashion Moda. But credit must also be given to timing. Graffiti
in the subways had been a divisive issue between liberals and New York politicians
for a number of years since the early 1970s when tag writers began using
new subway cars as moving billboards and Mayor John Lindsay declared war
on graffiti. To many New York intellectuals, including Norman Mailer, Lindsay's
anger and frustration seemed misplaced particularly since he had become
the hero of residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant and the South Bronx when, during
the riot-torn summer of 1968, he walked the streets of their neighborhoods
effectively calming their fears. He had also made them promises one of them
being new air conditioned subway cars: "'You see we had gone to such
work, such ends, to get those new subway cars in. It meant so much to people
here in the city to get a ride for instance in one of the new air-conditioned
cars.... And you know, that was work. It's hard to get anything done here.
You stretch budgets, and try to reason people into activities they don't
necessarily want to take up on their own.... We were proud of those subway
cars....And then...the kids started to deface them.'" Lindsay contended
that the working class who rode the trains saw graffiti as vandalism, and
visitors regarded it as sign of the deepening deterioration of the city.
Yet artists such as Claes Oldenburg celebrated it: "'You're standing
there in the station, everything is gray and gloomy and all of a sudden
one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a big
bouquet from Latin America.'" Yet no one from that earlier period could
have predicted the profound impact the graffiti culture, when combined with
rap music and break dancing and the fashions they spawned, would have on
American culture. While we are still too close in time to fairly evaluate
its influence, its power is such that the magazine section of the Sunday
The New York Times recently featured on its cover an article about Suge
Knight the C.E.O. of Death Row Records, the leading producer of Gangsta
Rap. For the author, Knight's real genius was being able to shape "street
culture for consumption by the youth of America."
Ironically, Fashion Moda has not benefitted from its embrace of this burgeoning
cultural phenomenon. Some of its more financially successful practioners--Holzer,
Haring and Basquiat--were supportive of its enterprise but just as the home-grown
graffiti writers had only fleeting fame with the commercialization of their
art, so too was Fashion Moda's direct involvement short lived.
Early on, however, its celebration of graffiti as an art form and its on-going
connection to the downtown art scene resulted in its being included in the
New Museums "Events" exhibition which opened in December 1980.
As described by one critic, Fashion Moda's 'event' was "more funky
than slick, more naive that sophisticated, more littered than organized"
but was indicative of its "democratic politics". What impressed
the critics and viewers was the democratic sharing of space by the urban
street artist and those with art school training and art world connections.
Forty-eight artists participated. In addition to the graffiti artists Ali,
Crash, Futura 1000, Lady Pink, Lee, Rammellzee Mic Controller, and Zephyr,
more established artists also participated: John Ahearn, Robert Colescott,
Keith Haring, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Philip Pearlstein, Judy Rifka, Christy
Rupp, as well as Eins, Lewis and Scott. The critical attention it received
was enthusiastic and supportive and with a museum catalogue, complete with
footnotes, bibliography and exhibition schedule, Fashion Moda entered the
nether world of the contemporary art world establishment.
In January 1981 Artforum included an article on Fashion Moda which included
a descriptive history of the organization in English, Chinese, Spanish,
and Russian as well as several posters designed by Stefan Eins, Christy
Rupp, John Fekner, John Ahearn, and Walter Robinson. The following month
a photograph of Scott, Lewis and Eins taken at Fashion Moda graced an article
"The New Collectives--Reaching for a Wider Audience," in the New
York Times Sunday Art and Leisure section. Fashion Moda was also becoming
associated with New Wave Punk Art scene associated with the East Village.
These developments were documented in a large, sprawling show curated by
Diego Cortez for P.S. 1 in Long Island City titled "New York/New Wave".
But it is was not well received and critics compared it unfavorablely to
Fashion Moda. The raw energy and vitality of the art spawned by the urban
ghetto was becoming sapped as it was embraced by the demimonde and fashion
vultures of Manhattan. Peter Schjeldahl writing for the Village Voice noted
that he had "anticipated something fervid, volcanic" but instead
found "participatory narcissism."
Meanwhile in the Bronx, Eins and company continued to encourage and support
the convergence of artists from downtown with the community of the South
Bronx believing according to Thomas Lawson that "art should be as available
to the poor and the disadvantaged as it is to the middle classes."
During the summer 1981, Justen Ladda created a now-famous and arresting
image titled The Thing next door in a deserted school building. Here in
its rubble strewn auditorium, Ladda painted the seats over which strode
a highly illusionistic cut-out of the comic-book inspired Spider Man. On
the stage he created a trompe l'oeil pyramid of books, a reminder of both
book burning and the community's loss of the school and its library.
By the end of the year, Fashion Moda's fame was such that its participants
were invited to take part in Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany. What Eins,
Holzer and the other artists involved in organizing their exhibit did, was
to create a store with the visual look of Fashion Moda. Here they sold prints,
T-shirts and novelty items by many of artists who had exhibited with them
including Holzer, Haring, Fekner, Wells, Rupp, Kenny Sharf, Mike Glier,
Tom Otterness, Kiki Smith, Louise Lawler. In addition, they maintained a
"video lounge" where tapes by Charlie Ahearn, Jane Dickson, Dieter
Froese, Joseph Nechvatal, and Glenn O'Brien could be viewed and bought.
Benjamin Buchloh, who was deeply critical of Documenta 7, calling it "a
desperate attempt to reestablish the hegemony of esoteric, elitist modernist
high culture," felt that Fashion Moda's participation was "one
of the few courageous curatorial choices".
In some ways Fashion Moda's participation was the high point of its critical
history and certainly many of the artists invited to participate in its
Kassel 'store' went on to have important careers in New York and internationally.
The fortunes of its Bronx site, however, have not fared as well. Eins continued
his direct involvement until 1985 and others including James Poppitz and
Juma Santos proceeded to run it but it never again garnered the critical
attention of its glory years nor did it benefit much from its involvement
with the new art stars from downtown.
Back to the Bronx
In an article in the New Yorker in 1983 Eins told the writer Calvin Tomkins
that he chose the South Bronx "partly because of its media image as
the worst ghetto in the nation." There is a whiff of opportunism in
Eins statement but it also expresses a romantic European point of view about
American ghettos. It is striking that few American writers in their discussions
of Fashion Moda 'saw' the South Bronx and commented about it as the context
for what was going on inside. In contrast, the Italian critic Francesca
Alinovi, who visited it in 1982, wrote an article accompanied by photographs
that made the area look like Dresden after the war: "Picking one's
way through the rubble of the city sacked by hordes of vandals, as in the
Middle Ages, one treads on electric wires, carcasses of cars, plants and
vegetation, all mixed together around the garbage...men and debris are the
same thing." Nor was the Bronx's reputation enhanced by the 1981 movie
"Fort Apache, The Bronx," or Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel Bonfire of
the Vanities.
The 1990s, however, have witnessed a turnaround in the borough brought on
by a variety of factors some of which were cited as early as 1986 by Jill
Jonnes in her book We're Still Here. The Bronx's resurrection is now documented
regularly in the New York Time, and last year Smithsonian magazine published
an article accompanied by upbeat illustrations by Ralph Fasanella and written
by a former resident of the borough Patrick Breslin called "On these
sidewalks of New York, the sun is shining again."
This then is a kind of happy ending to the history of Fashion Moda. Not
so much for this alternative art outpost as for the Bronx itself. Over the
past ten to fifteen years, the vast improvements in the quality of life
and the built environments can be seen as the victory of middle/working
class ethos over the forces of political opportunism, urban decay and neglect.
With the establishment of Hostos Community College with its post-modern
architecture, and the building of blocks of single-family homes, a new family-oriented
ethos prevails in the South Bronx. From this Bronx perspective neither the
benign neglect of the Reagan era nor the international trans-avant garde
have had as much impact or influence in creating this recovery as the working-class
values of its citizens.
Professor Sally Webster
Art Department, Lehman College CUNY
Bronx New York
Art History Program
Graduate Center CUNY
February 1996
1."Fashion Moda," Stefan Eins, Joe Lewis and William Scott interviewed
by Thomas Lawson, Real Life (January 1980): 7.
2. This history is best documented in Jill Jonnes, We're Still Here,
the Rise. Fall ! and Resurrection of the South Bronx, Boston: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1986.
3. The name Fashion Moda acknowledges the gallery's international character
since the English word fashion is coupled with its Spanish equivalent, moda,
and, when typefaces permit, it is translated into Russian and Chinese.
4. "Dialogue: Stefan Eins with Annette Barbasch," Cover,
v. 2, #1( January 1980): 35.
5. Calvin Tomkins, "The Art World, Alternatives," New Yorker
(December 26, 1983): 56.
6. Jane Kramer touched on this issue of an outsider's relationship to the
South Bronx in her New Yorker (December 21, 1992) article and subsequent
book Whose Art is It?, (Duke University Press, 1994) in which she
relates the controversy surrounding the placement and removal of John Ahearn's
three free-standing bronze sculptures, Raymond and Toby, Daleesha, and Corey
for a traffic triangle between 169th Street and Jerome Avenue in September
1991.
7. The exhibition of holography took place Fall 1978. In March 1979, Eins
mounted an exhibition on extraterrestrials called "Other Worlds"
(also referred to as "On Alien Intelligences") which included
a contribution from the astronomer Carl Sagan.
8. For a listing of the performers see: Events, New York: The New
Museum, 1981, pp. 26-7.
9. It is difficult, but maybe not necessary given the fluid structure of
Fashion Moda, to precisely document who was director when and with what
title. For instance, one piece of evidence from January 1981 cites Eins
as "founder, director"; Lewis as "director", and Scott
as "junior director." See: "Some Posters From...", Artforum
(January 1981): 50.
10. See: Alan Moore, "Stefan Eins," Artforum (February
1975): 72.
11. Claire S. Copley, "Research Report on the Field of Artists Spaces,"
conducted and compiled under contract to the National Endowment for the
Arts, May 19, 1980-November 1, 1980, p. 15. Also see: Organizing Artists:
A Document and Directory of the National Association of Artists' Organizations,
3rd ed., Washington, D.C.: National Association of Artists' organization
1992.
12. It is now located at 38 Greene Street.
13. Copley, p.33.
14. Alan Moore and Marc Miller, "The ABC's of No Rio and Its Times,"
introduction to ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art
Gallery, New York: ABC No Rio with Collaborative Projects, 1985, p.
3. A number of other exhibitions and performances, which took place under
the guise of theme exhibitions, where mounted such as the 'Batman' (organized
by Diego Cortez) and 'Dog' shows (by Robin Winters) at 591 Broadway. These
were followed by 'Income & Wealth' (by Colen Fitzgibbon) and the 'Manifesto'
show (by Jenny Holzer) at a storefront on Bleecker Street.
15. Other artists involved with the organization included: John Ahearn,
Scott and Beth B., Andrea Callard, Colen Fitzgibbon, Matthew Geller, Alan
Moore, Cara Perlman, Ulli Rimkus, Mike Roddy, Mike Robinson, and Christy
Rupp.
16. Jeffrey Deitch, "Report from Times Square," Art in America,
September 1980, pp. 59-63.
17. See: Peter Frank and Michael McKenzie, New, Used & Improved,
Art for the 80s, New York: Abbeville Press, 1987.
18. Lucy R. Lippard, "Real Estate and Real Art," Seven Days
(April 1980): 32-34.
19. Walter Robinson, "John Ahearn at Fashion/Moda," Art in
America (January 1980): 108.
20. Lou Cannon, "Reagan Makes Appeal for Black Votes," Washington
Post, August 6, 1980, p. 1.
21. The Faith of Graffiti, documented by Mervyn Kurlansky & Jon
Naar, text by Norman Mailer, New York: Praeger, 1974, n.p.
22. Ibid.
23. Lynn Hirschberg, "Does the Sugar Bear Bite, Suge Knight and his
Posse," The New York Times Magazine, January 14, 1996, pp. 24-31;
39-40; 50; 57.
24. Holzer as mentioned earlier did a series of 'truisms' for its windows
and later participated in Fashion Moda's 'store' at Documenta 7 in Kassel,
Germany. Basquiat exhibited at Fashion Moda under his 'tag' SAMO and in
1984 did a drawing for a benefit announcement. Haring was included as one
of the artists to represent the gallery at the New Museum "Events"
exhibition in late 1980.
25. The exhibition was organized in three parts and took place over a period
of three months from December 13, 1980 to March 5, 1981. Two other organizations
participated: Taller Boricua, a Puerto Rican arts workshop and Artists Invite
Artists, an ad hoc organization of minority artists invited by the New Museum
to introduce younger artists to a downtown audience. This latter effort
was a last-minute replacement when Colab decided not to take part. Fashion
Moda's participation extended from December 13, 1980 to January 8, 1981.
26. Mary Anne Staniszewell, "Fashion Moda," Artnews (March
1981): 230.
27. "Some Posters From...", Artforum (January 1981): 50-2.
28. Peter Schjeldahl, "New Wave No Fun," Village Voice,
March 410, 1981, p. 15.
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30. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Documenta 7: A Dictionary of Received
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31. Tomkins, New Yorker, p. 55.
32. Patrick Breslin, "On These Sidewalks of New York, the Sun is Shining
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