Last week’s grand opening of the venerated NEW MUSEUM on one of NYC’s most historically disheveled thoroughfares, Bowery, is a window on the future of the Apple’s Lower East Side. HOLLAND COTTER sheds some light on the shape of things to come in this week’s NY TIMES:

A view of Lizzi Bougatsos’s show, “Street Feather”at the James Fuentes gallery…

AN UPBEAT MOMENT FOR A DOWNTRODDEN AREA
By Holland Cotter

The inaugural festivities of the new New Museum of Contemporary Art kick off today at noon and continue for a celebratory 30 admission-free hours. Just east and south of the museum’s Bowery site, some two dozen galleries, many of them recent arrivals, are open for business. This is an upbeat moment for a part of town that has seen its share of hard times, and lots of people are cheering. But at least a few have a more skeptical take: Here comes the art, there goes the neighborhood.

Actually, this has been the situation since the East Village art boom of the 1980s, the last time Manhattan had anything like an alternative art universe, a neighborhood where artists and dealers — themselves often artists — lived, worked, showed, shopped and danced at night. But once art made the neighborhood chic, limousines were idling outside the storefront galleries. Real estate soared. Artists moved.

The Lower East Side just south of the East Village — roughly between Houston and Canal Streets east of Bowery — remained a bargain for a while and kept its Latino-Chinese-punk cultural mix. Galleries came and went; a few exhibition spaces — ABC No Rio, Gallery 128, the Asian American Arts Center, the Henry Street Settlement, the Educational Alliance — are still there. But this was never a gallery-intensive scene.

Things are changing fast. In the last few years several new galleries have put down roots. Canada, Cucchifritos, FusionArts, Participant Inc., Reena Spaulings and Rivington Arms led the way, later joined by Miguel Abreu Gallery and the artist-run Orchard; more recently James Fuentes, Fruit and Flower Deli, Smith-Stewart, Sunday, Eleven Rivington and Thierry Goldberg have opened.
In addition, there are some transplants: Janos Gat and Luxe have moved down from the Upper East Side, 31 Grand from Williamsburg and Envoy from Chelsea, with Feature coming in January. And satellite spaces are popping up: Lehman Maupin (Chelsea), Greenberg Van Doren (57th Street), Salon 94 (Upper East Side) and Museum 52 (London) have all opened Lower East Side extensions. Of the new crop, the start-ups are by far the most CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING…

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