How Iconic Gallery Just Above Midtown Swapped Art History’s Lone Geniuses for Vibrant Community
By Josie Roland Hodson, February 17, 2023
One November night in 1974, a boisterous crowd spilled out onto 57th Street in Manhattan as a new gallery opened in what was then the center of the art establishment and its elite power brokers. Linda Goode Bryant, a 25-year-old single mother fueled by a vision and some debt, opened the space to support an emerging group of Black conceptual artists whose work strayed from the representational mode celebrated in Harlem—the city’s Black art Mecca—while going unrecognized by New York’s white art world. At the gallery known as Just Above Midtown, they found a home.
The gallery is now the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax in collaboration with Goode Bryant, that gathers more than 120 works of art and ephemera from JAM’s 12 feverish years of existence. In that period, the gallery moved three times, mostly due to evictions—but the exhibition demonstrates that, despite its structural precarity, JAM offered resistant space for artists to play at the edges of the art world’s established mores. ( … )