The Schitibank project features bohemian East Villagers — Jean-Michel Basquiat and Patti Smith (on Schitibikes), Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Ted Berrigan, the New York Dolls, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Gem Spa's own Candy the Cat (smoking weed).
The Swiss-born Frank influenced countless photographers and was likened to Alexis de Tocqueville for so vividly capturing the United States through the eyes of a foreigner. Besides his still photography, Frank was a prolific filmmaker, creating more than 30 movies and videos, including a cult favorite about the Beats and a graphic, censored documentary of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 tour. Black-and-white Super 8 pictures by Frank were featured on the cover of the Stones’ “Exile On Main Street,” one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most acclaimed albums.
Howl! mounts its most ambitious installation to date. Linus Coraggio is a central figure in downtown New York’s early period of explosive art experimentation and cross-pollination of cultural ideas. Street artist and New York City native, Coraggio is best known for his abstract metal sculpture.
The current exhibition surveys Coraggio’s entire body of work, including paintings in expressionist and graffiti style, mobiles, furniture, neon, sculpture, mixed-media collage, and both classic and 3-D graffiti. The exhibition will also include recent collaborations with well-known downtown artists, and an installation of his painted and “sculpturalized” car that has become a recognized cultural fixture on the streets of New York City over the last 10 years.
Coraggio is a founder of the Rivington School sculptors group. He welded a massive post-apocalyptic sculpture garden of rusted metal that was a landmark at Forsyth and Rivington Streets in New York’s Lower East Side. Coraggio was also the architect of the Gas Station, a performance space, after-hours club, and sculpture garden that sat on Second Street and Avenue B well into the 90s. These seminal downtown art spaces were the vanguard of wild autonomous art activism in the face of rapid gentrification.
