iNew Museum · Bowery, Lower East Side
The Bowery: Devil's Mile
The inaugural exhibition traces five centuries of the Bowery's history, from Lenape footpath through skid row to thriving arts community, examining the street as a site of ongoing reinvention.
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In the first gallery stands an enameled 1836 pump wagon that belonged to the volunteer firefighters of Lady Washington Engine Company No. 40. Around it are tickets, handbills, songbooks and ads for the dime museums and variety theaters that once lined the street outside.
The show runs in order: old maps and a marble milestone, Jacob Riis's flash photographs, Weegee and Berenice Abbott, then CBGB in the late 1970s. A small room plays Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, much of it shot in her Bowery loft, which Art in America's J. Hoberman calls the outstanding work here. You walk out of it straight into a wall of 28 portraits by Billy Sullivan.
Hoberman calls the show compact but says it "punches above its weight." He misses Lionel Rogosin's 1956 film On the Bowery; the only film here is a 1902 comedy loop. Admission is $28, free for 18 and under, and pay what you wish on Thursdays from 7 to 9pm, booked online.
Look for
The Lady Washington pump wagon
Look for the enameled 1836 fire engine of a volunteer company, the centerpiece of the first gallery among the dime-museum handbills.
The Five Points painting
An unknown artist's early 19th-century copy of George Catlin's crowded slum street scene, which upstages the stiff Peter Stuyvesant portrait beside it.
Martha Rosler's Bowery grid
Forty-five photographs of empty Bowery storefronts and bottle-strewn gutters, paired with slang words for being drunk instead of captions.
Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
A slideshow of candid portraits of friends, many shot in her Bowery loft, in a small room with its own soundtrack.
Brad Kahlhamer's Bowery Nation
In the final gallery, a 25-foot wooden plank on sawhorses carries 22 spidery birds and rows of kachina dolls made from found objects and refuse.
Good for
- Evening Visits
- Nerding Out
- Out-Of-Town Guests
With kids
Visitors 18 and under get in free.
Free in the same building
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Image credits
5
- The Bowery: Devil's Mile© Weegee / International Center of Photography
- Anna Maria Maiolino. ANNA—And the Infinite LineCourtesy of Hauser & Wirth
- Common SenseCourtesy of Brooklyn Museum
- Luminous ColorCourtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum
- New MuseumMusikAnimal, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0