ABC No Rio

Location & Contact:

156 Rivington Street
New York , NY 10002
212-254-3697
Email Us
Visit our website
View our Facebook page

Description:

ABC No Rio is a community center for the arts on Manhattans Lower East Side. Our gallery and performance space was founded by visual artists committed to an actively engaged culture that promotes critical analysis and an expanded vision of possibility for our lives and the lives of our neighborhoods, cities, and societies. Weve retained these values to the present.

ABC No Rios genesis was on New Years Day, 1980, when more than thirty artists occupied an abandoned building and mounted The Real Estate Show. The exhibition was shut down by police, the artwork confiscated. The City was forced into negotiations with the artists and offered the storefront and basement at 156 Rivington Street.

Over the years ABC No Rio has presented an incredible range of artistic expression dealing with war, homelessness, drugs, sex, violence, and the politics of housing and real estate. In the mid to late-eighties No Rio helped energize the burgeoning East Village performance scene and was instrumental in the resurgence of spoken word and performance poetry. In 1990 No Rio became active in the hardcore music scene, instituting a policy of not booking racist, sexist or homophobic bands and carving out a welcoming space in that scene for young people of color, young women, and gay and lesbian youth. ABC No Rio is one of the best-loved punk venues in the world.

Recognition of ABC No Rio is widespread. In 1990 Kunstlerhaus in Hamburg, Germany, mounted the show 10 Years, Seven Days, a celebration of ABC No Rio's first decade. The founding of ABC No Rio played an important part in the Cultural Economies show at The Drawing Center in 1996. In 1998 we reviewed our own history for the Urban Encounters exhibition at The New Museum for Contemporary Art. Andrea Mellers documentary about ABC No Rio, 156 Rivington, was frequently broadcast on the Sundance Channel in 2003 and 2004. Work by artists involved in the founding and early years of ABC No Rio was included in the East Village USA show at the New Museum and in The Downtown Show at NYU.

Program activity at ABC No Rio breaks down into two categories: public events programming, and facilities and resources. In addition to exhibitions of visual art and our weekly hardcore/punk matinee, public events programming includes COMA, our series of experimental and improvisational music; literary readings; performance; and film & video screenings. We also provide space to other cultural and community organizations for meetings, workshops, benefits and forums.

On the upper floors of our building on Rivington Street weve developed public facilities used by both artists and the community at large. These resources include a silk-screen printshop, a darkroom, a computer center, and a zine library. Through these facilities and resources we have also provided arts education classes in photography, drawing and printmaking to neighborhood youth and others.

Photos