The New York Nonprofit Where Generations of Artists Got Their Start

The 212 column revisits New York institutions that have helped define the city, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.

CURRENTLY PROJECTED ON the walls at Artists Space, a nonprofit arts organization in TriBeCa, are two films by Carolyn Lazard that the 37-year-old artist shot inside a training center at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. Lazard, who is disabled, says they approach their work as a “chronic patient,” often addressing in their videos and installations the slowness and boredom they’ve experienced during frequent medical visits. In one of the films, “Vital” (2025), the performers Martine Syms and Cyrus Dunham play a mother-to-be and a doctor during a fictional visit. Syms goes through the motions of a typical checkup — she arrives at the front desk, then anxiously scrolls through her phone in the waiting room — before being examined by Cyrus, a last-minute fill-in for her usual obstetrician. With a blank look, he shuts down question after question about doulas and epidurals, leaving the viewer to wonder whether what we’ve watched is truly a scene of care at all.

While you might not expect to hear the thumping of a fetal ultrasound in an art gallery in downtown New York, at Artists Space, which has been a blank slate for emerging and experimental practices for over 50 years, it seems natural. Since its founding in 1972, the organization has supplied hundreds of writers, curators and artists with an alternative platform that stands apart from traditional exhibition avenues like museums and commercial galleries. Cindy Sherman worked there as an assistant; Laurie Anderson staged early performances at the gallery. The nonprofit has also been a hub for avant-garde music and political organizing. “I hope that the space feels like [its] name — like a container that’s ever refilling,” says Jay Sanders, the organization’s executive director and chief curator.

Since 2019, Artists Space has occupied the ground floor and basement of a former carpet factory, its sixth home. The structure underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation that kept the building’s grand neo-Classical facade intact but cut a new main entrance in an alley along its side. In the past several years, the neighborhood around it has grown into a prominent arts district, with dealers like David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth opening outposts nearby. However, when Artists Space first arrived downtown, the area was far less developed. Artists had only just begun moving to SoHo in the ’60s, taking over the cavernous loft spaces left empty there by textile manufacturers. Galleries followed in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The dealer Paula Cooper, who championed conceptual and minimalist artists, opened her space in 1968. Leo Castelli, a gallerist who gave Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella their first solo exhibitions, and who had previously only operated on the Upper East Side, planted roots in the neighborhood in 1971.

It was in this transitional landscape that the critic Irving Sandler and the arts administrator Trudie Grace teamed to conceive of the Committee for the Visual Arts, Inc., as part of a pilot initiative from the New York State Council on the Arts. Their mandate was simple: They would feature only artists who had no gallery representation and had never previously shown in the city. The early exhibitions, on the third floor of a SoHo loft building, functioned like a game of art-world tag, in which Sandler invited each of three well-known artists to nominate another artist. In October 1973, for Artists Space’s second show, the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt chose the sculptor Jonathan Borofsky, who presented his serial “Counting” project (1969-present), for which the artist wrote consecutive numbers on pieces of paper and stacked them with the goal of tallying from one to infinity. These appeared alongside pieces by the painters McArthur Binion and Mary Obering, who were nominated by Ronald Bladen and Carl Andre.

The artist Robert Longo was living in Buffalo with Sherman, his girlfriend at the time, when he first learned about Artists Space. The couple ran an independent art space of their own, called Hallwalls, below the loft that they shared with a few friends and, in 1976, the then-director of Artists Space, Helene Winer, who’d later become Longo and Sherman’s dealer at the gallery Metro Pictures, invited Hallwalls to participate in an exchange show. Six artists associated with Hallwalls presented their work at Artists Space, while five artists chosen by Hallwalls in collaboration with Winer — the performance artist Jack Goldstein and the painter David Salle, among others — were showcased at Hallwalls. Longo recalls that, while he was organizing the exhibition, he would hitchhike from Buffalo to New York and sleep inside the gallery. “Artists Space was like our clubhouse,” he says.

In the late ’70s, two distinct but overlapping American art movements were founded and briefly flourished at Artists Space: the Pictures Generation and No Wave. The Pictures Generation, a crop of young artists (Longo and Sherman among them) who took a critical eye to the culture of mass media by immersing themselves in the imagery of television and magazines, was inaugurated by a 1977 show, “Pictures,” curated by Douglas Crimp. The following year, Longo and the Hallwalls artist Michael Zwack organized a five-day festival of No Wave music, a particularly anarchic subgenre of punk that prioritized rhythm and noise over melody. The movement was short-lived but marked a brief moment when the worlds of visual art, film and music came together. The festival was advertised with fliers posted around the city listing participating bands, including Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Gynecologists and DNA. The event had no name and the price of admission was $3. In attendance was Brian Eno, who had come to New York to work on a Talking Heads album; he would later produce “No New York,” a compilation album featuring bands that performed. The second-to-last night of the festival was cut short when James Chance, the saxophone-playing frontman of the Contortions, leaped into the crowd to start a fistfight with the Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau.

BECAUSE ARTISTS SPACE operates as a nonprofit, its curatorial team is able to “be pure in our vision,” Sanders says, and to take risks. That freedom has allowed the organization to stage several landmark shows over the years: In 1987, for example, the artist Jimmie Durham and the critic Jean Fisher organized “We the People,” one of the first major showcases of postmodern Indigenous American art to take place in a non-Indigenous art space. However, the organization’s nonprofit status also means that its programming has been under the microscope since its inception. One notorious conflict occurred in 1979, when Artists Space presented an exhibition of abstract black-and-white charcoal drawings by a white artist, Donald Newman, that included a racial slur in its title. In response, a coalition led by Linda Goode Bryant, who ran the gallery Just Above Midtown, which highlighted artists of color, sent a letter to Artists Space staff that described the decision as “an incredible slap in the face”; among the signers were the artists Howardena Pindell and Faith Ringgold and the critic Lucy Lippard. The New York State Council on the Arts, which provided 60 percent of the organization’s funding at the time, received letters arguing that its constituents’ money had been misused to support offensive artwork.

Another conflict came to a head in 1989, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, around the opening of the exhibition “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, a group show curated by the photographer Nan Goldin at Artists Space’s West Broadway gallery, to which the nonprofit had moved in 1984. An essay in the exhibition catalog by the artist David Wojnarowicz titled “Postcards From America: X-Rays From Hell” drew the ire of politicians and the National Endowment for the Arts, which took particular issue with a section of the text that described the Catholic Church as a “house of walking swastikas” and criticized Cardinal John O’Connor, then the archbishop of New York, who had campaigned against the distribution of safer-sex information. Artists Space found itself at the center of a national media spiral, prompting the N.E.A. to temporarily rescind the $10,000 it had awarded the organization to produce the show and catalog. The grant accounted for a third of the exhibition’s funding.

Today, the future of public funding for the arts in the United States is uncertain. Earlier this year, the N.E.A. imposed a condition that grant applicants must attest they would not “promote gender ideology” in response to an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Inauguration Day; in March, the N.E.A. suspended the requirement after the A.C.L.U. filed a lawsuit arguing that the measure infringes on free speech. The president also signed an executive order in March aimed at eliminating the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an important channel for federal arts funding, and in April, the Trump administration announced it would cut $65 million from the budget of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Today, Artists Space receives the majority of its funding from private donors, yet a small but essential part of its budget — less than 10 percent — comes from public dollars.

Alternative spaces like Artists Space are often an accessible point of first contact for new ideas and emerging practices. Lazard’s show, for example, marks a significant evolution in the artist’s oeuvre. They studied experimental filmmaking at Bard College, so making “Vital” was Lazard’s first experience working with actors on a film set, as well as their first time working in the format of narrative storytelling. New York has changed a lot since 1972. Many other prominent alternative and noncommercial spaces have come and gone over the years, including Exit Art, Art in General and the long-running Metro Pictures, which closed in 2021. Artists Space, and its mission, is one of the few cornerstones of contemporary art in the city that remains intact. The organization’s goal, in Sanders’s words, is the same as it always was: “to give an artist the ability to make a dream project, really, on their own terms.”