JAM, a Gate-Crashing Gallery, Expanded the Idea of Blackness
In the hardscrabble New York of the ‘70s, Just Above Midtown Gallery created a model for an art world to come. At MoMA, that experiment has plenty of life.
By Holland Cotter
When is a time capsule a treasure chest? When does a scrapbook read like a utopian syllabus? When is an art archive its own form of art? Answer: when the exhilarating exhibition “Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces” opens at the Museum of Modern Art this Sunday.
The Manhattan gallery named Just Above Midtown debuted in 1974, an inopportune moment for a start-up. New York’s economy was scraping bottom; infrastructurally, the town was a mess. The gallery itself had scant financial backing, yet was setting up shop on 57th Street, in what was still, at the time, art’s commercial Gold Coast, a few blocks north of MoMA.
There was another, potentially intractable obstacle to success: The new gallery was African American-owned and run. And, as such, it was the first of its kind to plant a flag inside the gated community that was and (despite surface signs otherwise) still is a white New York art world.
The founder of Just Above Midtown (hereafter referred to as JAM) was a 25-year-old Black
artist, art historian and activist named Linda Goode Bryant. And she opened the gallery where she did precisely with gate-crashing in mind. If that meant keeping the space afloat by maxing-out credit cards, so be it. Playing the debt game worked. Despite three evictions, JAM survived for 12 years. And its can-do, risk-tolerant example has provided the DNA for many other experimental ventures that have followed.
What Bryant and JAM had going for them from the very start was a built-in core community of artists as talented as they were ambitious, who were hungry for exactly the kind of in-but-not-ofthe- mainstream-art-world positioning that JAM provided.
In photographs in the MoMA show, we see these artists doing their own work, but also doing JAM work: answering phones, brainstorming finances, and renovating the gallery’s three successive locations. Together they published journals and books (including an early study of Black Conceptualism), collaborated on a proto-podcast video workshop called “The Business of Being an Artist.” They lured audiences in from the street with homemade “JAM brunches,” and at one point ran an artists’ day-care center on the premises. On every level, JAM was a D.I.Y. situation. ( … )