Locating Downtown Conference - Day 1

Please join us at Bobst Library on Friday, January 23, 2026, for Day 1 of "Locating Downtown," a three-day gathering co-hosted by New York University Special Collections and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The flourishing of art and culture in downtown New York between the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s and Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral election in 2001 has inspired an explosion of exhibitions and publications—both scholarly and popular—in the past two decades. There has also been increased attention paid to earlier iterations of art downtown: the bohemian art colony of Greenwich Village and in the artist-run storefront galleries of the Lower East Side beginning in the 1950s. This three-day gathering seeks to explore the concept of “downtown,” opening up multiple histories and ways of conceiving what the term means today.

Attentive to the multifaceted and deeply interdisciplinary nature of downtown cultural production, Locating Downtown seeks to create opportunities to reconsider this period through cross-disciplinary exploration and cultural exchange. Underpinning this investigation is a desire to bring together different methodological approaches to the study of downtown New York—its artists, archives, institutions, and histories.

Friday's full day of presentations will be complemented by visits to galleries, museums, and archives in New York on Saturday, and additional presentations at the Whitney Museum on Sunday.

Further scheduling details will be posted as soon as the full program is confirmed.

Image credit: Flyer, Lower Manhattan Drawing Show. Stephen Mass Papers; MSS.592; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University.

As a part of NYU's commitment to global inclusion, our events and initiatives are open to individuals of all backgrounds and identities.