East Village USA
December 9, 2004 - March 19, 2005

Imagine a village where everybody is an artist, nobody has or needs a steady job, and anyone can be the art world's Next Big Thing. Such was the myth (and occasionally the reality) of the East Village in the mid-1980s, when glamour and sleaze were nearly indistinguishable, and the boy next door was an androgynous, foot-high-peroxide-pompadour-sporting singer named John Sex. It was the height of the Reagan era, with its Cold War paranoia, intensified by growing nuclear fears, and inner cities and civic institutions in a state of increased upheaval and decay. Meanwhile, the East Village was busy inverting the values of trickle-down economics and gunboat diplomacy by transforming itself into the American dream's dark underside, its evil twin, its inner child run amok.

Shelter Lines