Alternatives in Retrospect

This video presents a history of alternative spaces in New York City during the late 1960s and early 1970s, focusing on two galleries that no longer exist. The work produced in these two spaces forms the basis of the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s 1981 exhibition Alternatives in Retrospect: An Overview 1969-1975. Curator Jacki Apple, who produced the video, assembled documentation from the galleries and reconstructed artworks for the exhibition.

“I remember people saying that galleries had certain kinds of disadvantages. I saw these disadvantages ... and thought there should be some kind of free space where there wasn’t any jurisdiction of criteria, so that art could grow in a very natural way,” Jeffrey Lew, Founder of 112 Greene Street, says.