The most recent excursion through the ever-growing, ever-changing, always interesting Lower East Side launched, not as usual from Orchard and Houston but from Grand and Allen—a good deal further west and south. The Art Scene is moving and I wanted to bring my latest tour group closer to where things seem to be headed. So I had chosen nine galleries, seven of them west of Allen, two back on Orchard but south of Grand. There are over 130 galleries listed in the most recent Gallery Guide to The Lower East Side and I’d spent a good deal of time visiting as many as I could in order to bring as diverse a group of them to the attention of my tour participants while still being able to get them all in within a two and half hour tour. And we nearly made it. I think we ran about twenty minutes over but, I hope, everyone felt it worth it. The galleries we visited were: Marc Strauss, James Cohan, Johannes Vogt, Hester, Nathalie Karg, Gavin Brown Enterprise, Miguel Abreu, McKenzie Fine Art and Rosai Ugolini.
I was pleasantly surprised, and very gratified, to see that of all the galleries on the Lower East Side, Roberta Smith also singled out four of the galleries I had included in my tour in her New York Times article on the most interesting art in that part of the city.