ABC No Rio

Interior of ABC No Rio

Cover of the book: ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery (1985) Edited by Alan Moore and Marc Miller. New York: ABC No Rio with Colab. Cover art by Joseph Nechvatal

ABC No Rio is a social center located at 156 Rivington Street on New York City's Lower East Side that was founded in 1980. It features a gallery space, a zine library, a darkroom, a silkscreening studio, and public computer lab. In addition, ABC No Rio plays host to a number of radical projects in New York City, including weekly hardcore punk matinees and the NYC Food Not Bombs collective. ABC No Rio seeks to be a community center for the Lower East Side, sponsoring projects and benefits for the community, as well as a center of radical activism in New York City, promoting "do it yourself volunteerism, art and activism, without giving-in or selling-out to corporate sponsors."

History

Founding

Beginning in the late 1960s, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was facing massive disinvestment by absentee landlords — by the late 1970s up to 80% of the area's housing stock was abandoned and in rem (seized by the city's government for non-payment of taxes). By the late 1970s and 1980s, a growing squatter movement and a small but visible “downtown” arts scene developed from within the burgeoning gentrification of the largely Puerto Rican community in the Lower East Side.

ABC No Rio itself grew out of the 1979 Real Estate Show, organized by the artists' group Colab (Collaborative Projects), in which a large group of artists seeking to foster connections between these communities occupied an abandoned building at 123 Delancey St. and turned it into a gallery to show solidarity with working people in a critique of the city's land use policies — policies that in essence kept buildings empty until the area again attracted investment from developers — and a demonstration of what can be achieved through solidarity. The show was to explicitly "illuminate no legal issues" and it called for "no rights"; instead, it was "preemptive and insurrectionary." The show opened to the public on January 1, 1980; it was promptly shut down before the morning of January 2 by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). In the following negotiations with HPD, the organizers of The Real Estate show were granted the use of the building at 156 Rivington Street. That space became ABC No Rio. The name derives from the remaining letters of a mostly-effaced sign that was on the building: "Abogado Notario." ^[1]

ABC No Rio was conceived of as an "art-making center," a community-oriented alternative to what its founders perceived as an overly hierarchical art world and gallery scene. It was to be "a place where you could do things that wouldn’t even cross your mind to do in a gallery."^[2]

Recent legal struggles

In the negotiations following the occupation of 123 Delancey St, ABC No Rio was given tacit permission to use its current building, located at 156 Rivington Street. ABC No Rio was in legal limbo for decades, sometimes a squat, sometimes paying a small rent to the city. In 1994, the city revoked ABC No Rio's commercial lease and stopped accepting their rent checks. The city planned on selling the building to Asian Americans for Equality for only $4,000. This city tactic of attempting to divide non-profit community groups had been used many times to split groups that the city approves of from more confrontational ones was used frequently against Lower East Side squatters throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.^{[citation needed]} In October 1994, in response to the attempted eviction, a few activists began squatting the upper floors of the building, which had been unused for several years. The squatters' presence stalled the eviction proceedings for several years, along with the community-based protests, which resulted in several arrests. ABC No Rio refused to give up the space and embarked on a project of raising money and reforming their image, to appear to be a more legitimate organization in the eyes of the city.

In 1997, the city agreed to sell the building to ABC No Rio for $1 provided ABC could raise the money to renovate the building and bring it up to code, and that the squatters living in the upper floors of the building vacate to free the space for public use. After three years, the squatters, numbering around 10 and including a young family, left their apartments, which were converted to a zine library, a "Food Not Bombs" kitchen, a silk screening studio, a computer lab, and other artist spaces. Over the years the city changed the scope and price of renovation several times, until 2004 when it was agreed that renovation could be broken into three phases and that the property would be sold when the collective had the funds for phase one in place. On June 29, 2006, the city completed the proposed sale, selling 156 Rivington St. to ABC No Rio for $1, still including the provision that the organization must raise the rest of the money to renovate the building.[1]

Current projects

ABC No Rio is a collective of collectives; the individual projects enjoy a great deal of autonomy in their day-to-day affairs. Building-wide matters are addressed at building collective meetings. Some of the current projects are:

Development project

In June 2009, ABC No Rio was awarded $1,650,000 in capital funding from New York City for a development project of the Rivington Street site.

Punk and hardcore

Perhaps ABC No Rio's best known project is the Punk/Hardcore Collective. Since December, 1989, ABC No Rio has hosted weekly punk/hardcore matinees on Saturday afternoons. For most of the 1980s, the NYC punk/hardcore scene had been focused around the Sunday matinees at CBGB's. These shows devolved into weekly bloodbaths due to gang violence and, therefore, in November, 1989, CBGB's stopped hosting them. The new shows at ABC No Rio were carefully set up to be devoid of the violence, homophobia, sexism, and machismo that took over the CBGB's matinees, and to this day follows a policy of booking only independent (i.e., non-major label) bands that do not in any way promote sexism, racism, homophobia, and so on. ABC No Rio is also one of the few places in New York City to host regular punk/hardcore shows that are all ages. It is often considered the Gilman Street of the East Coast, having hosted and nurtured many of the bands in today's punk scene. The weekly hardcore/punk matinee opens between 3 and 3:30 on Saturdays, bands start at 4, the entry cost is US $7. More information can be found at http://www.abcnorio.org/punk and http://www.myspace.com/abcnoriopunk.

Zine library

ABC No Rio holds a large collection of zines formerly hosted by the now-defunct Lower East Side radical bookstore and infoshop Blackout! Books. The collection spans over two decades, and features many zines with a radical political perspective, or a focus on punk and other DIY art forms. Some titles include: Love & Rage, Maximum RocknRoll, Profane Existence, Slug and Lettuce, Retard Riot as well as many other less regularly printed or single-issue titles.

Food Not Bombs

The New York chapter of Food Not Bombs cooks on the second-floor kitchen of ABC No Rio every Sunday, and serves free food in nearby Tompkins Square Park.

Darkroom Collective

The Darkroom Collective runs a public darkroom on the third floor of ABC No Rio that is open 2 days a week.

Computer lab

The Computer Center on the fourth floor of ABC No Rio seeks to close the digital divide by providing a public computer lab to the underserved Lower East Side. The computer lab is made up only of donated computers, and runs almost exclusively free or open source software.

Silkscreening Collective

The Silkscreening Collective runs a public screen-printing studio, also located on the fourth floor.

Books Through Bars

The Books Through Bars Collective sends free donated books to persons incarcerated in U.S. prisons. BTB used to meet every regularly at No Rio, but in anticipation of the building being closed for renovation have relocated their efforts temporarily. Information on the project can still be obtained at ABC No Rio. (see also: Books to Prisoners)

COMA

The Citizens Ontological Music Agenda is a project that hosts experimental music, poetry, and other forms of performance on Sunday Evenings.

Visual Arts Collective

The Visual Arts Collective co-ordinates shows and exhibitions in the main gallery, as well as the bi-annual building-wide Ides of March group exhibit.

The purpose that drives this collective is to maintain a free and spontaneous environment for displaying art, as well as providing a venue for art which may be excluded from the mainstream due to its radical political content.

The visual arts committee has included Amy Westpfahl, Victoria Law, Steven Englander, Mike Estabrook, Vandana Jain, Julie Hair, Alan Moore, Brian George, Kelly Savage, Michael Cataldi, Joyce Manalo, and many others.

See also

• Bluestockings (bookstore)
• 924 Gilman Street
• Che Cafe
• Mr. Roboto Project
• C-Squat
• Dos Blockos
• Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center
• Modified Arts
• Paper Heart
• The Smell
• The Vera Project
• Trunk Space
• Collective:Unconscious

Video

• Video of ABC no Rio's January 2007 art show

References

1. ^ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/03/07/110307fa_fact_sanneh
2. ^ http://bombsite.com/issues/2/articles/34

• Alan W. Moore, "Artists' Collectives: Focus on New York, 1975–2000", Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, Blake Stimson & Gregory Sholette, eds, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2007, pp. 204 & 219

• Alan Moore and Marc Miller, eds., ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery, Collaborative Projects, NY, 1985

External links

• ABC No Rio official website
• The Book: ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery
• New York Times article on the Real Estate Show
• 1981 BOMB Magazine interview with ABC No Rio by Shelley Leavitt
• Satya Magazine article about ABC No Rio from March 2006
• 1996 Village Voice article on the eviction
• NY Times article on the resolution of the eviction
• Time Out New York article on the resolution of the eviction
• 2004 CUNY GC Advocate article on fundraising efforts
• 2007 WireTap Magazine article on No Rio as a sustainable project.
• 2008 Brooklyn Rail article about No Rio's building and the future of the organization.
• Short documentary of ABC no Rio's Zine Library from 2009

Coordinates: 40°43′9″N 73°59′8″W / 40.71917°N 73.98556°W / 40.71917; -73.98556