Two hundred artworks, predominantly by downtown New York artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, and Donald Baechler, have been acquired by the Grey Art Gallery at New York University (NYU). Donated by collecting couple Dr. James Cottrell and Mr. Joseph Lovett, the works will be accompanied by a new named gallery and study center. The couple has lived in lower Manhattan for over four decades and built personal relationships with artists whose work they acquire.
NYU, which has campuses in Greenwich Village and Brooklyn, is an important research center for scholars of New York City’s downtown art scene. For example, the university’s Fales Library has the largest archive dedicated to the artistic milieu in SoHo and the Lower East Side from the 1970s into the 1990s. The Grey Art Gallery — which was founded in those critical years, in 1974 — has partnered with the library in the past, for example on the exhibition The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984, held in 2006.
A notable work in the acquisition is Deborah Kass’s “Parisien Gertrude Stein” (1998), a blue and black silkscreen featuring a repeated image of expat writer and luminary Gertrude Stein. Kass was already established as a painter when she embarked upon the “Warhol Project” (1992-2000), in which she unapologetically appropriated the Pop artist’s aesthetic but replaced the celebrities with her own icons, who were often Jewish or lesbian. Barbra Streisand prominently featured in the project, along with Stein, who was also the subject of Kass’s 1993 “Chairman Ma” series, a riff on Warhol’s portraits of Chairman Mao.
The same year, Kass gave donors Cottrell and Lovett the Warhol treatment in “Jim and Joe” (1993). The silkscreen, which is also included in the gift to NYU, depicts a black and white image of the pair that recurs across a series of brightly colored panels. An essay by Sue Scott reports that Kass and the couple met through mutual friends, and “a rocky start caused by reciprocal dislike of one another’s dog transformed into a close friendship and eventually into a collector/artist relationship.”
A pick of works from the donation will be on view in spring 2022 as part of Grey Art Gallery’s exhibition Mostly New: Selections from the NYU Art Collection.
