April 19 – May 18, 2014
Cuchifritos Gallery/Essex St Market 120 Essex St, New York, NY 10002
Artists: John Ahearn, Liza Bear, Peter Fend, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Robert Goldman (Bobby G), Julie Harrison, Becky Howland, Lisa Kahane, Gregory Lehmann, Ann Messner and Laurie Arbeiter, Alan Moore, Tom Otterness
Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space is honored to present The Real Estate Show, What Next: 2014. An extension of The Real Estate Show of 1979/1980, this exhibition will serve as a living project space, presenting new work that continues to question the impending re-development of the Seward Park Urban Redevelopment Area (SPURA) sites. By addressing certain issues that have both united and polarized the neighborhood over the last 30+ years, the exhibition will encourage artists and community members to become an active part of the conversation by focusing on the particular insights and experimental processes that artists bring to imagining new urban spaces. All of the projects, contributed by former Colab members and participants in the original Real Estate Show, take form through audience engagement, as Cuchifritos becomes a flexible site for the active processes unfolding throughout the duration of the exhibition.
The Real Estate Show, which opened on December 31, 1979, was an extra-legal occupation of and art show in the city-owned building at 123 Delancey Street on the Lower East Side. Organized by Collaborative Projects (Colab), a collective of artists and activists that formed in 1977 to create exhibition and funding opportunities for artists, the exhibition sought to address the growing real estate crisis in New York City, with the dissolution of lower-income neighborhoods, amassing evictions and displacement of non-wealthy residents. The exhibition, as much art show as it was collective action, was shut down on the morning of January 2, 1980 by The New York City Department of Housing, Preservation and Development, who replaced the once-broken lock and removed all of the artwork, prompting an influential press conference called by the show’s organizers. This public demonstration, attended by the New York Times, Soho Weekly News and, notably, artist Joseph Bueys, led to negotiations between the representative artists and the city resulting in the eventual founding of ABCNoRio at 156 Rivington Street.