BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
Marc H. Miller is the kind of New Yorker who knows how to save the scraps. Posters, flyers, zines, and announcement cards that most people folded into back pockets and forgot — Miller kept them. Out of those boxes came Gallery 98, a living archive of downtown’s unruly art history, told through the paper that passed hand to hand.
The period that is most alive in this collection spans from the 1970s into the 1990s, when the city was both falling apart and brimming with invention. Cheap rents and abandoned buildings drew in art school kids, squatters, and the first waves of graffiti writers moving beyond the train yards. You see Blade, Lee, Daze, Crash, Lady Pink, LA II — writers who set the pace before names like Haring and Hambleton followed with their own vocabularies on the street.
The streets and clubs were full of crossings: drag performers, punks, hip-hop DJs, and young artists finding each other downtown. Groups like Colab squatted buildings and staged wild exhibitions; ABC No Rio opened as an outpost for confrontation and community. Ephemera from those nights — an invite, a Xeroxed flyer — is what Gallery 98 specializes in, proof that the most disposable things sometimes carry the longest shadows.
By the 1990s, the energy pushed into new corners. Ad Hoc Gallery, Skewville, Bast, Shepard Fairey — the next wave of artists who kept the mix alive, printing, pasting, and staging in ways that bent art back toward the street even as it was pulled into galleries. Gallery 98 carries these moments forward too, charting how one generation’s walls became another’s starting point.
Miller’s project isn’t nostalgic so much as archival. It’s about memory, about how the downtown scene keeps resurfacing through its paper trail. Some get nervous seeing counterculture artifacts priced and sold — but without this kind of attention, much of it would be lost entirely. Gallery 98 reminds us that history is often fragile, and sometimes the only way to keep it is to hold onto what was once throwaway.
Here are a few new clips that work both as a lesson and a showcase. All videos: written, edited, and narrated by Cole Berry-Miller. Text in quotes by Marc H. Miller
BLADE the Legend
“The rise of graffiti in the 1970s and 80s radically challenged many aspects of the mainstream art world. Blade (Steven Ogburn) was an early pioneer whose innate sense of color, scale and design earned him international recognition. Much of the material used in this video comes from a large collection of Blade material that Gallery 98 recently acquired from his longtime Bronx friend, Ronnie Glazer. “
Rivington School Sculpture Garden: Making Art Out of Junk Metal Found on The Street, 1985 – 1987
“In 1985, sculptors hanging out at No Se No, a Lower East Side artist-run bar, began using an adjacent empty lot to create a bizarre sculpture garden made up of pieces of junk metal found on the streets. The city would soon demolish its work, but it has lived on in photographs by Toyo Tsuchiya (1948 – 2017), who, in the year before he unexpectedly died, collaborated with Gallery 98 in creating a portfolio tracing the garden’s history.”
Breaking Into an Abandoned City-Owned Building to Mount an Exhibition About Real Estate, 1980
“When the artist group Colab wanted to present an exhibition about real estate abuses, they decided that the best way to get attention was to break into an empty city-owned building and mount it there. The exhibition was quickly shut down, but in a surprising twist, the Real Estate Show gave birth to the alternative art space ABC No Rio Dinero, which continues to thrive 45 years later.”
