Artists' SoHo
49 Episodes of Intimate History
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During the 1960s and 1970s in New York City, young artists exploited an industrial wasteland to create spacious studios where they lived and worked, redefining the Manhattan area just south of Houston Street. Its use fueled not by city planning schemes but by word-of-mouth recommendations, the area soon grew to become a world-class center for artistic creation—indeed, the largest urban artists’ colony ever in America, let alone the world.
Richard Kostelanetz’s Artists’ SoHo not only examines why the artists came and how they accomplished what they did but also delves into the lives and works of some of the most creative personalities who lived there during that period, including Nam June Paik, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman, Hannah Wilke, George Macuinas, and Alan Suicide. Gallerists followed the artists in fashioning themselves, their homes, their buildings, and even their streets into transiently prominent exhibition and performance spaces.
SoHo pioneer Richard Kostelanetz’s extensively researched intimate history is framed within a personal memoir that unearths myriad perspectives: social and cultural history, the changing rules for residency and ownership, the ethos of the community, the physical layouts of the lofts, the types of art produced, venues that opened and closed, the daily rhythm, and the gradual invasion of “new people.” Artists’ SoHo also explores how and why this fertile bohemia couldn’t last forever. As wealthier people paid higher prices, galleries left, younger artists settled elsewhere, and the neighborhood became a “SoHo Mall” of trendy stores and restaurants.
Compelling and often humorous, Artists’ SoHo provides an analysis of a remarkable neighborhood that transformed the art and culture of New York City over the past five decades.
“Kostelanetz tells a great neighborhood story as important for understanding the past as for reinventing the future. Those thinking about New York City— the avant-garde, architectural preservation, urban planning, and American utopias—will find it rich and provocative.”
“. . . Like the neighborhood it describes, Kostelanetz’s cheerfully episodic book is full of odd corners, secret alleys and sudden vistas.”---—Publisher's Weekly (on the first edition)
“Kostetlanetz’s approach to the history of SoHo, with an emphasis on its heyday as a community of artists during the 1960s through the 1980s, is prismatic, covering all relevant perspectives: the history of the era, the rental laws of the period, the ethos of the community, the variety of physical layouts of the residential/studio lofts, the sort of art being produced, the stores that opened and closed in the neighborhood, the daily rhythm of activity and quiet, the gradual discovery and invasion of SoHo by a wealthier population, the economics of the locale, the surrounding neighborhoods, and much more. The cumulative effect is a complex and encyclopedic portrait of a place and time in New York City history.”