Mariam Nihal

Saudi Gazette The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery recently announced their upcoming exhibitions ‘Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965’ and a collaboration with duo Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti with site-specific installations planned to be showcased in the art gallery and around the NYUAD campus on Saadiyat Island. The exhibition observes the New York art scene between the peak of Abstract Expressionism in the early 1950s and the rise of Pop Art and Minimalism in the early 1960s. It will bring a major collection of historical artworks organized by the Grey Art Gallery to Abu Dhabi. Inventing Downtown is open to public and ends on 18 January.The show features over 200 paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, photographs, films and works by over 50 artists who pursued abstraction and figuration alongside those who worked with installation and performance art. The artists include Yayoi Kusama, Alex Katz, Mark di Suvero, Claes Oldenburg, and Yoko Ono, Ed Clark, Emilio Cruz, Lois Dodd, Rosalyn Drexler, Sally Hazelet Drummond, Jean Follett, Lester Johnson, Boris Lurie, and Aldo Tambellini. Maya Allison, Founding Director and Chief Curator of the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery spoke to Saudi Gazette in an exclusive interview about the exhibition. She said Inventing Downtown focuses on an important group of artists in their early development in 1950s New York. It was organized by their sister museum at NYU in New York, with loans from over 100 museums, collectors, and artists. “We are proud to bring it to our own academic museum. In may ways it continues our thinking about how artistic innovation happens, as with the work of a certain UAE group of avant-garde artists, whose work we showed last Spring in the survey of their work in the two decades before they became famous, in the exhibition called ‘But We Cannot See Them: Tracing a UAE Art Community, 1988-2008.’ During our Spring show, we saw how artists supported each other’s creative development at a time when there was not a commercial market for selling their work. These artists are now considered groundbreaking and art-historically important,” she said. Likewise, in New York City of the 1950s, there was not much market for contemporary art, beyond Abstract Expressionism. Artists who did not fit that >www.nyuad-artgallery.org.