Grey Art Gallery, New York University

18 Cooper Square

New York, NY  10003

(212) 998-6780

https://greyartgallery.nyu.edu

My review on TripAdvisor:

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60763-d136958-Reviews-Grey_Art_Gallery_NYU-New_York_City_New_York.html?m=19905

The front of the Grey Art Gallery at NYU

I am finding more and more that the university art galleries are mounting very interesting and clever exhibitions and some as edgy as their large museum counterparts. I recently attended the ‘Art After Stonewall’ exhibition which is created as a two part exhibition with the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art to showcase the post Stonewall riots to the beginning of the AIDS crisis.

“Art After Stonewall” exhibition

The exhibition was an interesting mix of pictures, video, graphic paintings and posters and documentary work combined to show the mood of the times. Some of the most impressive works came from clips of documentaries on Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory Movies’, and the documentaries on ‘Tongues Untied’ and ‘Paris is Burning’ about the gay crisis about men of color and the racism that they faced even within the Gay Community.

The East Village Art Community from the 1980’s “Art After Stonewall”

Some of the photos of then fringe neighborhoods are funny to see as they have been gentrified beyond what anyone could have thought thirty years ago from the early 1980’s. The East Village of back then and of today are world’s apart.

The College did a good job mounting the show and telling the story that is both humorous and sad at the same time. Also, the Grey Gallery is small so you can get through the exhibition in about an hour.

The Grey Gallery exhibition “Art After Stonewall” This is a Keith Haring poster.

The most recent exhibition that I visited “Mudd Club 1978-1983: The Stephen Mass Papers” and the people who had visited the club at that time.

(from the museum website)

MUDD CLUB 1978-1983

THE STEPHEN MASS PAPERS

February 3 – March 9, 2024

Broadway Windows and Project Space

The Broadway Windows of the “The Mudd Club” exhibition in the NYU Broadway building.

In collaboration with NYU Fales Library and Special Collections, 80WSE Gallery presents an exhibition featuring materials from The Stephen Mass Papers, focusing on the legendary Mudd Club venue in New York City (1978-1983) through photographs and extensive notes. Located at the street-level Broadway Windows gallery and Project Space, the exhibition materializes the file structures of the archive and select visual documents contained within the collection. 

The Broadway Windows of “The Mudd Club”.

The archival extracts provide rare insight into an important epicenter of downtown art, music, fashion, and culture at a transitional point in New York City and American life marked by rapid urban gentrification and the dawn of The Reagan Era. Within this atmosphere, post-punk musicians, independent designers, contemporary artists, and celebrities coalesced to animate the Mudd Club ‘cabaret’.

The Broadway windows of the “The Mudd Club”.

Acquired by Fales in 2019, the Stephen Mass Papers spans 16.75 Linear Feet in 24 manuscript boxes, 3 half manuscript boxes, 2 small flat boxes, 2 oversize flat boxes, 1 media box, 1 oversize folder in shared housing, and 1 sound reel in shared housing, including 33.92 Megabytes in 167 computer files, 1 sound tape reels , 1 videocassettes (u-matic), 10 audiocassettes, and 6 film reels.

The Broadway Windows of the “Mudd Club”.

“Stephen Mass is an entrepreneur who co-founded the Mudd Club located at 77 White Street in downtown New York City in 1978 along with art curator Diego Cortez and Anya Phillips. The venue became a focal point of the downtown music, art, and cultural scene in the late 20th century, showcasing the intersections of popular and avant-garde performance culture, gender and sexuality, celebrity culture, music, visual art, fashion, film, and nightlife. 

The opening sign from the Grey Gallery on the NYU Campus.

The Stephen Mass Papers (inclusive dates 1940-2019, bulk dates 1978-2009) documents the founding and operation of the Mudd Club in New York City, Mass’s other entrepreneurial ventures in New York, and his nightclubs and restaurants in Berlin, as well as his personal life and family history. Consisting of both paper and electronic formats, the collection includes extensive notebooks and notes containing the planning and working notes for Mass’s various endeavors, financial and legal documents, promotional materials for events (such as posters, flyers, and newsletters), ephemera (differentiated from promotional material, as promotional material Mass collected from other clubs or organizations), press coverage, and photographic materials such as prints, negatives, and slides.” 

 The Grey Gallery exhibition of the “Mudd Club 1978-1983: The Stephen Mass Papers”.

—Fales Library and Special Collections

The Fales Library & Special Collections comprises 350,000 volumes of book and print items, over 11,000 linear feet of archive and manuscript materials, and about 90,000 audiovisual elements.

In 2024, the Grey Gallery moved to its new home at 18 Cooper Square and has a whole new contemporary look to it.

The history of the Grey Gallery on the NYU Campus.

Works from the permanent collection at the new “Grey Gallery” at 18 Cooper Square.

The front of the gallery for the “Americans in Paris” exhibition

I was invited to a new exhibition open to students at NYU “American’s in Paris”, an exhibition of American artists who had been living and creating their art in the City of Lights after WWII until the 1960’s.

The sign for the “American in Paris” exhibition.

The entrance to the new Grey Galleries.

The back Galleries for the “Americans in Paris” exhibition.

The works of the artist “Kimber Smith” in the “American in Paris” exhibition.

The exhibition “American’s in Paris” with artist Joan Mitchell’s work.

The exhibition “American’s in Paris” work by artist Ed Clark.

The works of artist Henry Cousin’s in the exhibition “American’s in Paris”.

The galleries of the Grey Art Galleries

Peter Saul’s “Man in Electric Chair”

“Man in Electric Chair”

The Jazz band entertaining us at the opening of the “Americans in Paris” exhibition.

As an Alumnus of NYU, I now come for the exhibitions and just enjoy myself. I came in for the newest exhibition.

The exhibition in 2024 was “Make Way for Berthe Weill”: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde

The main sign from the exhibition

(from the Grey Gallery website)

Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde surveys the groundbreaking career of the first woman modern art dealer. Berthe Weill (1865–1951) championed many fledgling masters of modern art early on—such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Amedeo Modigliani—as well as numerous others who did not achieve wide acclaim. Yet her role in early 20th century modernism has been omitted from most historical accounts.

The exhibition will feature some 110 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture—many of which were shown at her gallery during the first four decades of the 20th century. Examining Weill’s contributions to the history of modernism as a gallerist, a passionate advocate of contemporary art, and a Jewish woman, it brings to light the remarkable achievements of a singular figure who overcame sexism, antisemitism, and economic struggles in her quest to promote emerging artists (From the NYU-Grey Gallery website).

The timeline of her career

The gallery that night

The art featured were artists promoted by the art dealer

The artwork by female artist Emilie Charmy

The work by artist Mark Chagall

One of my favorite pieces in the show by Mark Chagall

The Mission of the Grey Art Gallery:

The Grey  Art Gallery is New York University’s fine arts museum, located on historic Washington Square Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village. As a university art museum, the Grey Art Gallery functions to collect, preserve, study, document, interpret and exhibit the evidence of human culture. While these goals are common to all museums, the Grey distinguishes itself by emphasizing art’s historical, cultural and social contexts, with experimentation and interpretation as integral parts of the programmatic planning. Thus, in addition to being a place to view the objects of material culture, the Gallery serves as a museum-laboratory in which a broader view of an object’s environment enriches our understanding of its contribution to civilization (NYU Grey Gallery History)

The History of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University:

The Grey Art Gallery is located within New York University’s Silver Center-the site of NYU’s  original home, the legendary University Building (1835-1892). Winslow homer, Daniel Huntington, Samuel Colt, George Innes and Henry James all lived and worked there, as did Professor F.B.Morse, who established the first academic fine arts department in America on the site now occupied by the Grey Art Gallery.

Demolished in 1892, the original building was replaced by the Main Building (renamed the Silver Center in 2002). Here was located, from 1927 to 1942, A. E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art, NYU’s first art museum and the first institution in this country to exhibit work by Picasso, Leger, Miro, Mondrian, Arp and members of the American Abstract Artists group. Gallatin aspired to create a forum for intellectual exchange, a place where artists would congregate to acquaint themselves with the latest developments in contemporary art. In 1975, with a generous gift from Mrs. Abby Weed Grey, the Museum’s original space was renovated, office and a collection storage facility were added and the doors were reopened as the Grey Art Gallery (Museum history).

Exhibitions organized by the Grey Art Gallery encompass aspects of all the visual arts: painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking, photography, architecture and decorative arts, video, film and performance. In addition to originating its own exhibitions, some of which travel throughout the United States and abroad, the Gallery hosts traveling exhibitions. Award-winning scholarly publications, distributed worldwide are published by the Grey Art Gallery. In conjunction with its exhibitions, the Grey also sponsors public programs including lectures, symposia, panel discussions and films (Museum history).

The new Gallery is at 18 Cooper Square.

(This was taken from the Museum’s website).

Enjoying a evening at the Grey Gallery

The new exhibition in the spring of 2025 was ‘Anonymous was a Woman’ , an execution on the ‘Anonymous was a Woman’s and the great programs effects on mid-Career female artists in the Unit.

The information sign in the front gallery

The entrance of the gallery the night of the exhibition

The entrance to the Grey Art Museum

This was the sign inside for the exhibition

The inside gallery at the start of the show showcasing the collection on display

The main gallery at Grey Gallery

These were the pieces from the show that I found most impressive:

One of the more unusual paintings from the exhibition ‘Monalisa’ by artist Ida Applebroog

The sign for ‘Monalisa’ by Artist Ida Applebroog

The sculpture ‘Rom’s Delhi’ by artist Judy Pfaff

The sign for ‘Rom’s Delhi’

The painting ‘Svati: Now and Then’ by Artist Chita Ganesh

The sign for ‘Svanti: Now and Then’

The sculpture ‘Untitled #1242’ by Artist Petah Coyne

The sign for the sculpture

The sculpture ‘Bones 2000’ by Artist Polly Apfelbaum

The sign for the sculpture

The painting ‘Flamethrower’ by Artist Carrie Moyer

The sign for the painting

The crowd at the end of the evening at the

‘Opening Night’

This unusual sculpture in the middle of the room

Astor Court at the end of the evening at the Grey gallery

I recently attended the ‘Irrititja Kuwaiti Tjungu‘ exhibition on Aboriginal art. It was a very interesting look at Native Art from Australia. This exhibition opened in February of 2026 and the artists were in attendance to talk about their works.

https://greyartmuseum.nyu.edu/exhibition/irrititja-kuwarri-tjungu-contemporary-aboriginal-painting-from-the-australia-desertjanuary-20-2026-april-11-2026/

(from the NYU/Grey Gallery website):

Irriṯitja Kuwarri Tjungu celebrates fifty years of Papunya Tula Artists. It features nearly 120 paintings, including some of the most iconic works of Indigenous Australian art. Rather than being arranged chronologically, the paintings are displayed according to Indigenous principles of genealogy, place, and ancestral travels. In doing so, the show reveals the deep, ongoing relationship between Aboriginal artists, the places they paint, and Tjukurrpa, which exists in a constant state of past and present together—or, in Pintupi, irrititja kuwarri tjungu.

The exhibition also recognizes the long association between Papunya Tula Artists and New York University forged by Professor Emeritus of Anthropology Fred Myers. Since 1973 Myers has served as one of the movement’s most prominent international advocates. His continued involvement with the community brought the exhibition Icons of the Desert to the Grey Art Museum in 2009. While that exhibition showcased early works from Papunya, Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu honors and extends the legacy of the company’s founding artists.

The promotion sign for the exhibition

The art exhibition in the main gallery

Some of the works in the main gallery

(from the NYU/Grey Gallery website):

Fifty years ago, a painting movement emerged at Papunya in Aus­tralia’s Central Desert. It arose with such force and convic­tion that one could be forgiven for thinking it had existed forever, as though etched from the earth by the slow pas­sage of time. In fact, formed in the aftermath of colonization, the enduring art movement is as much a product of recent his­torical circumstances as the ancient traditions on which it draws.

Now widely recognized in global contemporary art, painting at Papunya began in 1971 when a small group of Aboriginal men in the community started to represent once-secret ancestral designs of ceremony and ritual, using acrylic paint on scraps of cardboard, linoleum, and Masonite. Their seemingly abstract paintings revealed living ancestral connections known as Tjukurrpa (Dreaming), which fueled powerful artistic experiments with color, line, and space. The following year, in an act of unprecedented corporate sovereignty, the artists formed Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd., the first Aboriginal-owned arts enterprise in Australia. The company’s economic success has allowed generations of men and women artists to stay on their ancestral lands, and continues to provide vital opportunities for local community development.

These were some of my favorite pieces of art from the exhibition:

One of the pieces I admired in the exhibit

‘The Men’s Dreaming at Iloilo’

I thought this colorful work was interesting

The work ‘Lupuinga’

I loved the powerful colors of this painting

The ‘Karilywarra’ work is very colorful

This painting I thought would be interesting in textiles

The painting ‘Travels of Kutungu from Papunnga to Muruntji’

Some of the works at the back of the gallery

Some of the works in the second gallery