Making the Scene
Making the Scene: The Midtown Y Photography Gallery, 1972-1996
New York Public Library
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
NYC
Now - September 16, 2007
This exhibit tracks the fortunes of the Midtown Y Photography Gallery - its 25-year history, and the role it played as photography moved into the art world. The Gallery was founded in a corridor of the Emanu-El Midtown Y.M.-Y.W.H.A. by the photographer Larry Siegel.
Text from the New York Public Library website:
The gallery’s focus on emerging photographers was solidified in 1983 under the directorship of Michael Spano and a newly formed board of advisers made up of significant members of the photographic community, including Helen Gee, Aaron Siskind, Arthur Leipzig, Larry Fink, and Jeffrey Hoone. Although the gallery still occasionally presented new work by photographers with established careers, such as Sidney Kerner or Louis Stettner, the majority of the work presented was by up-and-coming photographers born in the late 1940s or 1950s. The gallery’s typical practice was to feature three photographers, each of whom showed between 25 and 30 photographs, in a single exhibition. The photographers paid a flat fee to the gallery (to cover the cost of printing invitations), and the gallery provided press, mailing, and an opening. Profits from exhibition sales went directly to the photographers, many of whom also donated one or two prints to the gallery’s permanent collection. In 1993, when the Educational Alliance took over the Midtown Y, the gallery moved to 197 East Broadway. Tighter administrative controls at the new location, the appearance of new venues for photography, and increased competition for dwindling state and national funding for arts programs resulted in the closing of the gallery in 1996.