The sources listed below offer an entry point into reading about and around the Downtown Collection. Most of the links will take you to the item record in the online catalog for NYU Libraries. (You may need to log into the NYU system to view the content.) Click here to search the catalog directly. Local users who do not have access to NYU library holdings can access books, e-books, and journal articles through the New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, or Queens Public Library websites.
ARCHIVES
- Burton, Antoinette, ed. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History. Duke University Press, 2005.
- Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Trans Eric Prenowitz. University of Chicago Press, 1998.
- Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
- Edwards, Brent Hayes. “The Taste of the Archive.” Callaloo 35/4 (Fall 2012): 944–972.
- Eichhorn, Kate. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Temple University Press, 2013.
- Farge, Arlette. The Allure of the Archives. Trans. Thomas Scott-Railton. Yale University Press, 2013.
- Foucault, Michel. Archeology of Knowledge. Pantheon Books, 1972.
- Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” small axe 26 (June 2008): 1–14.
- Ketelaar, Eric. “Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives.” Archival Science 1 (2001): 131–141.
- Muñoz, José Esteban. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8/2 (1996): 5–16.
- Sassoon, Joanna and Toby Burrows, eds. Minority Reports: Indigenous and Community Voices in Archives. Archival Science 9/1–2 (June 2009). Special Issue.
- Stoler, Ann. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press, 2009.
- Yale, Elizabeth. “The History of Archives: The State of the Discipline.” Book History 18 (2015): 332–359.
DOWNTOWN SCENE (general)
- Banes, Sally. Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body. Duke University Press, 1993.
- Kostelanetz, Richard. Soho: The Rise and Fall of an Artist’s Colony. Routledge, 2003.
- McLeod, Kembrew. The Downtown Pop Underground. Abrams Press, 2018.
- Taylor, Marvin J., ed. The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984. Princeton University Press, 2006.
DOWNTOWN SCENE (topics)
Biography / Criticism / Memoir
- Carr, Cynthia. Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. Bloomsbury, 2012.
- Packer, Renée Levine and Mary Jane Leach, eds. Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music. University of Rochester Press, 2015.
- Colby, Georgina. Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
- James, David E. To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground. Princeton University Press, 1992.
- Johnson, Dominic. Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture. Manchester University Press, 2012.
- Lawrence, Tim. Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–1992. Duke University Press, 2009.
- Smith, Patti. Just Kids. HarperCollins, 2010.
- Valentine, Gary. New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation with Blondie, Iggy Pop, and Others, 1974–1981. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006.
- Wojnarowicz, David. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. Vintage, 1991.
Dance
- Banes, Sally. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
- Banes, Sally. Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre, 1962–1964. Duke University Press, 1993.
- Lawrence, Tim. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983. Duke University Press, 2016.
Film / Video
- Dika, Vera. The (Moving) Pictures Generation: The Cinematic Impulse in Downtown New York Art and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
- Hawkins, Joan, ed. Downtown Film and TV Culture, 1975–2001. Intellect, 2015.
Music
- Barzel, Tamar. New York Noise: Radical Jewish Music and the Downtown Scene. University of Indiana Press, 2015. Companion website: https://ethnomultimedia.org/book.html?bid=32
- Fikentscher, Kai. “You Better Work!”: Underground Dance Music in New York City. Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
- Gann, Kyle. Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice. University of California Press, 2006.
- Gendron, Bernard. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
- Heller, Michael C. Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s. University of California Press, 2017.
- Hermes, Will. Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever. Macmillan, 2011.
- Katz, Mark. “Chapter 3: Out of the Bronx (and into the Shadows): 1978–1983.” In Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip Hop DJ. Oxford University Press, 2012.
- Lawrence, Tim. “Pluralism, Minor Deviations, and Radical Change: The Challenge to Experimental Music in Downtown New York, 1971–85.” In Benjamin Piekut, ed., Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, 63–85. University of Michigan Press, 2014.
- Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
- Piekut, Benjamin. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits. University of California Press, 2011.
- Valentin, Wilson. “Bodega Surrealism: The emergence of Latina/o Artivists in New York City, 1976–Present.” Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2011.
Theater / Performance Art
- Aliano, Kelly I. Theatre of the Ridiculous: A Critical History. McFarland & Co., 2019.
- Banes, Sally. Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York, 1976–85. University of Michigan Press, 1998.
- Bottoms, Stephen J. Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement. University of Michigan Press, 2004.
- Edgecomb, Sean F. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. (University of Michigan Press, 2017).
- Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance: Live Art Since 1960. H.N. Abrams, 1998.
- Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance Art: From Futurism to Present. Rev. and exp. ed. Thames and Hudson, 2001.
- Savran, David. Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group. Theatre Communications Group, 1986.
Visual Art
- Ault, Julie, ed. Alternative Art, New York, 1965–1985: A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
- Fensterstock, Ann. Art on the Block: Tracking the New York Art World from SoHo to the Bowery, Bushwick and Beyond. St. Martin’s Press, 2013.
- Oakley, Lucy, ed. Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965. Grey Gazette 16/1 (Winter 2017).
- Rosati, Lauren. Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960 to 2010. MIT Press, 2012.
- Wallis, Brian, ed. Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation. New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984.
Writing
- Algarín, Miguel, and Bob Holman, eds. Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Henry Holt and Co., 1994.
- Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. University of California Press, 2003.
- Kane, Daniel. “From Poetry to Punk in the East Village.” In Cyrus R. K. Patel and Bryan Waterman, eds., Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, 189-201. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Noel, Urayoán. In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam. University of Iowa Press, 2014.
- Passing Stranger: The East Village Poetry Walk. Produced by Pejk Malinovski. Online audio tour.
- Siegle, Robert. Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
- Stosuy, Brandon. Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974–1992. New York University Press, 2006.
LOWER MANHATTAN (various topics)
- Stansell, Christine. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. Henry Holt, 2000.
- Starecheski, Amy. Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City. University of Chicago Press, 2016
- coming soon
ORAL HISTORY / PUBLIC HISTORY / URBAN HISTORY
- Dunaway, David K. and Willa K. Baum, eds. Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Second edition. Altamira Press, 1996.
- Greenspan, Henry. “The Unsaid, the Incommunicable, the Unbearable, and the Irretrievable.” Oral History Review 41/2 (2014): 229–243.
- Perks, Robert and Alistair Thomson, eds. The Oral History Reader. 3rd edition. Routledge, 2015.
RIOT GRRRL
- Darms, Lisa, ed. The Riot Grrrl Collection. Feminist Press, 1993.
- Eichhorn, Kate. “Redefining a Movement: The Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library and Special Collections.” In Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order, 85–121. Temple University Press, 2013. Available here (permission pending).
Image credit: David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated), from the series Rimbaud in New York, 1977–79. David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library.