The Downtown Collection, which was founded in 1994, documents the boundary-breaking arts scene that evolved in SoHo and the Lower East Side in the late twentieth century.
The collection’s archival materials range in date from the late 1960s to the present day, with a focus on the 1970s–1990s, the heyday of New York City’s “downtown scene.” This period witnessed an explosion of artistic creativity that radically challenged conventions and changed paradigms in literature, music, theater, performance, film, activism, dance, photography, video and other art practices.
Artists who lived and worked downtown extended the experimental practices of previous generations while also collectively forging a new path, leading “downtown” to emerge as a distinctive field of cultural production in its own right. Their work tended to be multidisciplinary, multimedia, and non-hierarchical. It was intrinsically critical of the status quo and was often highly collaborative, continually breaching boundaries among the arts and in a way that mirrored the ethos of the downtown arts community as a whole.
Although the phrase “downtown scene” suggests a unified entity, the scene was a mobile and multifaceted art world that encompassed multiple overlapping creative communities with shifting alliances and affiliations. The goal of the Downtown Collection is to comprehensively document the full range of creative practices manifested on the downtown scene in all its iterations and configurations. This research collection, which is built on a documentary strategy, supports the work of students and scholars who are interested in the intersection of the contemporary arts with other forms of cultural and artistic expression.
The Downtown Collection includes the personal papers of artists, filmmakers, writers, composers, and performers; archives of art galleries, theater groups and art collectives; and collections relating to AIDS activism, music, oral history, and off-off Broadway theater. The Collection has substantial holdings in archival audio and video, as well as personal correspondence and journals, original photographs, materials relating to creative works and performances, and ephemera such as concert flyers. It also includes a significant amount of published material that is either by or related to people associated with the downtown scene. This material offers an indication of the scene’s effects on wider cultural currents and social movements.
You can locate the published materials (books, magazines, commercially released recordings, and press) in the Downtown Collection by using Bobcat, the library’s online catalog. For archival materials (including rare publications and recordings), browse the finding aids associated with this collection, either via the search portal or by clicking here.
Image credit: Jaime Davidovitch, Foam TV, 1983. Jaime Davidovitch Papers. Fales Library. Photo by Jennifer Kim.
This website is under construction and will be completed by the end of 2020. To access the main website for the Downtown Collection, click here. To access the main website for Fales Library & Special Collections, click here.
Note: Due to a renovation, all special collections repositories will be closed to researchers the following dates: May 22, 2019–September 2, 2019 and May 21, 2020–September 7, 2020. To explore the construction of NYU’s new Special Collections Center, click here.