The best way to approach “Inventing Downtown” is to follow the curator’s lead and see it not as an exhibition of works or even of artists, but of places—or rather, of a unique kind of place: those exhibition venues that sometimes move from place to place but always reflect a confluence of artists who elected to exhibit their work together. Some of the best-known among them, including the Tanager Gallery, Brata Gallery, and Hansa Gallery, were structured as cooperatives; the artists shared the expenses of the gallery as well as the decision-making and some of the labor. Others were simply the studios or living spaces of artists who invited colleagues to show their work. For instance, the City Gallery was part of Red Grooms’s loft on Sixth Avenue, and 112 Chambers Street was Yoko Ono’s studio. Other groups used donated spaces, like the Judson Gallery, which Marcus Ratliff (later a prominent graphic designer) started with Jim Dine and Tom Wesselmann at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square.
The finale of “Inventing Downtown” is devoted to the Green Gallery, a commercial gallery on 57th Street whose founder, Richard Bellamy, had been the hired director of the cooperative Hansa (which itself had moved uptown during the course of its seven-year existence). Bellamy became a key figure in the New York art world and was known as “one of the remarkable, eccentric personalities of the city.” A recent biography, Judith E. Stein’s Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art, offers a sympathetic portrait of an unconventional figure more adept at understanding art and artists than at the business of running a gallery.
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