Colab Again: The Real Estate Show and The Times Square Show Revisited

During the past few years, New York has seen the restaging of two groundbreaking underground art exhibitions, originally organized in 1980 by Lower East Side-based collective Colab: The Real Estate Show and The Times Square Show. The former, which took place illegally on New Year’s Eve in a vacant, city-owned building at 125 Delancey Street—and was shut down by the police after few hours—was restaged in Spring 2014 at four Downtown venues: James Fuentes Gallery, Cuchifritos, TheLodge Gallery, and ABC No Rio. The latter was organized in a disused Times Square massage parlor and restaged in Fall 2012 at Hunter College’s Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery.Both the original shows are representative of the revolution from below that characterized the NewYork art world in the postmodernist era, particularly the influence of punk and street cultures on an emerging generation of artists involved less in conceptual than social and cultural issues. CollaborativeProjects Inc., known informally as Colab, was a loosely organized group of artists active from 1977 to the mid-1980s, with headquarters in ABC No Rio, a still existing squat on Rivington Street in the LowerEast Side. Its network varied from thirty to a hundred members, and included artists, writers, and curators like John and Charlie Ahearn, Andrea Callard, Diego Cortez, Jane Dickson, Stefan Eins, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Bobby G., Mike Glier, Jenny Holzer, Becky Howland, Lisa Kahane, Alan W. Moore, James Nares, Tom Otterness, Christy Rupp, Kiki Smith, Wolfgang Staehle, and Robin Winters.