A housing-project kid became a radical artist through Lower East Side institutions

Evidence

Morea, twenty-five, had grown up in the Amsterdam Houses, a housing project that replaced nine acres of San Juan Hill tenements. An aspiring jazz musician and a teenaged heroin addict, he benefited from art therapy and moved down to the Lower East Side in 1959 to become a painter. There he met and was deeply impressed by the Living Theatre, participating in their 1962 Peace Strike; a habitue of Tenth Street galleries, he joined Tambellini’s Group Center later that year and was also part of the circle around the ecology-minded anarchist Murray Bookchin. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 932

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core thesis that avant-gardes are produced by conditions — here cheap-rent geography and art therapy literally launch an artist’s career.