
Downtown New York

Painter Lee Quiñones grew up on the Lower East Side and began his career tagging subway cars. His latest paintings are cut from his studio walls.

Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983 at the Museum of Modern Art and The Mudd Club book.

“I didn’t want to paint figuratively. I didn’t want something that was overtly referencing the social issues around me, but I wanted to find a way to describe them. How do you internalize this? How do you make a form that forces a painting to be an experience that is not necessarily easy to see, handle, or look at?”

The debut novelist of Self-Portrait with Boy on the DUMBO of the 1990s, accidental art, and the importance of being unladylike.

The French writer Édouard Louis recorded his days in New York, around the time of the American release of his novel The End of Eddy. The following entries originally appeared in French in the June 6, 2017, edition of Les Inrockuptibles.

A performance artist who grew up in the circus uses clowning, street dance, and butoh in playful and provocative combinations.

John Giorno’s influence as a cultural impresario, philanthropist, activist, hero, and éminence grise stretches so widely and across so many generations that one can almost forget that he is primarily a poet.

Aakash Mittal is a performing artist and composer who employs colorful dissonance, meditative silence, and angular rhythm to express environments ranging from the American West to the streets of Kolkata.

“We were relegated to Chick Lit, romance novels, our subjects were love and motherhood and other sexually-defined things. Modern Love mocks that, to some degree. It pushes back.”

I sat at the bar of the Zwiebelfisch in Berlin together with David Bell, the renowned Kant scholar; it happened to be one of his regular haunts and it was the only spot where we could have an undisturbed meeting whenever he was in Berlin.
