Downtown artists scavenged construction waste and urban detritus as raw material.

Evidence

Jacobs was not the only young artist to take urban detritus as material. Boris Lurie, a thirty-five-year-old painter yet to make a sale, had begun collaging tabloid newspapers and porn magazines, inaugurating a mode he would call “No!art.” Mark di Suvero, twenty-seven, was scavenging industrial wooden beams from downtown construction sites, hauling the material to his studio in a former sail factory around the corner from the Fulton Fish Market. Aldo Tambellini, thirty, recently arrived from upstate New York and living in a storefront at 217 East Second Street, collected washbasins and pipes from demolished buildings south of Delancey, affixing them with nails and tin cans and sometimes coating them with plaster cement. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 119

Categorization

• SEED: The demolition sites south of Delancey as a materials commons could anchor an essay on how urban renewal itself supplied the avant-garde’s raw material.