Avant-garde art shows operated out of tenement cellars beneath critical respectability.

Evidence

Les Lions opened in May 1960 at the March Gallery, a tenement cellar at 95 East Tenth Street, around the time that a more respectable, minimalist version of The Street was installed at the Reuben Gallery around the corner at 61 Fourth Avenue. Lurie’s show was reviewed in the Voice but, befitting its basement location akin to the Gaslight and other MacDougal Street dives, not by an art critic. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 139

Categorization

• XREF: The tenement-cellar gallery at 95 East Tenth Street is a prime data point for the book’s core argument about cheap rent and ignorable art forms making invention possible — connects to the reader’s broader gentrification-origin thesis.