By Kim Velsey 11/28/12 5:03pm

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD

The Sperone Westwater Gallery is not a fan of the proposed development.

NIMBY Battle Heats Up on the LES, but Whose Backyard Is It?

The Bowery now has a Freitag boutique and a Whole Foods. Galleries and trendy restaurants rub shoulders with wholesale kitchen equipment suppliers (at least it’s convenient for the restaurants). The question of gentrification is not if or when but how fast. This should not be news to anyone who lives or works below 14th Street, particularly not an art gallery that opened on the Bowery last year.

And yet, one of the more bitter battles currently being fought over neighborhood change and development has pitted the year-old Sperone Westwater gallery against a proposed 25-story hotel and tower next door, according to The Wall Street Journal. The twist is that although the art gallery has won some local residents to its cause, the tower has garnered the support (via rent guarantees) of an affordable housing development that borders the planned project. Read More

By Jack Mcilroy Reid 8/28/12 6:28pm

Art

A work by ICY and SOT. (Photo by Robert Altman)

Made in Iran: Street Art and Punk Music?

Last Thursday, as one of several photographers pointed his lens, two grown men posed by their paintings, shyly smiling and giving no indication whatsoever that they were the reason everybody was gathered. They were young street artists, Iranian siblings ICY and SOT, whose exhibition of around 30 paintings, titled MADE IN IRAN, spent just three days in the Open House Gallery on the Bowery last week.

“They’ve been in New York less than a month,” Mona Dehghan, the artists’ PR rep, told us. “They have been arrested and the like back in Iran for what they do. Expressing yourself creatively is still something that is not fully understood, so to do it illegally on the street is a definite no-go. They are here seeking asylum.” Though they shouldn’t forget that graffiti is a punishable crime here too, they moved to a country where street art is considered high art. Street art’s prominence in the gallery scene has gone hand in hand with the increase of economic disparity in the West, as rebellion and anarchy are suddenly exciting prospects. People such as Banksy and Dan Witz have wrenched street art’s reputation and dragged it from the alleyways, and we asked the artists if the fame of these other artists has had a positive or negative effect on their own careers, especially considering we had heard more than one attendee utter the phrase “It looks like a Banksy.” Read More

By Paul Laster 8/25/10 1:22am

Red-Hot Steel? Sperone Westwater Gallery Scrapes the Bowery Sky

Once the site of flophouses, pawnshops and dive bars, the Bowery is fast becoming a headquarters for contemporary art and architecture. The New Museum’s critically acclaimed opening there three years ago ushered in what its director, Lisa Phillips, rightfully dubs a “Bowery Renaissance.” The area takes another step up with the Sept. 22 Read More

By Emily Geminder 5/12/10 2:44pm

The Street Where You Live: The Bowery, Scrubbed

The disreputable ghosts of Boweries past-the gangsters, vagabonds and punk rockers who saw the street shape—shift over the past century and a half—likely have more in common with each other than with the citizens of the Bowery lately. The last few years’ barrage of the new (new luxury condos, new cuisine, the boxy Read More

By Reid Pillifant 7/06/09 2:52pm

The Grande Dame of New York City Land Use

The way Doris Diether tells it, she was the last holdout in her Waverly Place building a few years back, when the landlord moved in someone new to intimidate her.

“Every time he’d go by me, he growled. Then one night he banged on my door and said, ‘If you think you’re getting any Read More