Return to Downtown: Rare and Iconic Functional Art from 1980s NYC

Carmen Spera, Dan Friedman, Elizabeth Browning Jackson, Forrest Myers, Howard Meister, James Hong, Laura Johnson Drake, Main & Main, Rafael Barrios, Richard Snyder, Terence Main, Terry Fugate-Wilcox

Superhouse, in collaboration with Magen H Gallery, is honored to present Return to Downtown, an exhibition of historical works from NYC’s Design Art movement of the 1980s and 1990s.

Return to Downtown centers on rare and iconic works from 12 artists and designers at the forefront of the American Design Art movement, who worked in a broad range of styles, from Minimalism to Pop and from gestural to Industrial. Uniting the movement was the legendary gallery Art et Industrie, opened in 1977 by Rick Kaufman and Tracy Rust. The gallery inhabited various locations in Downtown Manhattan for 20 years and quickly became a locus of creative energy.

The 20 works on view, curated by Superhouse founder Stephen Markos, are exhibited again in the heart of Chinatown, just blocks from where they were shown originally. Some works, like Elizabeth Browning Jackson’s juicy, surfboard-inspired Gloria bench and Main & Main’s Moondog table lamp have not been viewed publicly since the mid-1980s and are made available now at Superhouse for the first time in decades.

Photo credit: Luis Corzo