Forthcoming New Museum Show Is a Love Letter to the Bowery

The New Museum in Manhattan will open “The Bowery: Devil’s Mile” on September 24, an exhibition tracing roughly 400 years of history along the Bowery through archival materials, artifacts, and artworks. Objects will include an 1830 hand-pump fire engine, surviving dime-museum attractions, Jacob Riis’s documentary photography, and works by artists such as Keith Haring, Lynda Benglis, and June Leaf. The show opens alongside a previously announced Arthur Jafa survey in the museum’s newly expanded building and frames the Bowery’s evolution from a Lenape footpath on Mannahatta to Bowerij Road in the Dutch colonial era. The exhibition narrative includes the 1640s emancipation and land grants to 11 Black men formerly enslaved by the Dutch, the Bowery’s 19th-century entertainment economy, its “Skid Row” reputation by the 1940s, and later cultural revivals tied to artists and venues such as CBGB, founded in 1973.

Read the full article at Hyperallergic