The Bowery: Devil’s Mile is the first exhibition to trace the rich cultural history of New York’s oldest thoroughfare, illuminating the Bowery—now home to the New Museum—as one of the most infamous yet astonishingly underexplored streets in the world.
Known in the twentieth century as a notorious skid row, the Bowery has had many incarnations: a Lenape footpath; a home to farms and cattle drives; the site of racetracks and pleasure gardens; a center of popular entertainment with theaters, concert halls, tattoo parlors, and dime museums; and most recently, the spine of a thriving artist community. This exhibition is an introduction to the richness and complexity of the Bowery and its generative power and concentrated energy as a street, a neighborhood, and a state of mind.
For centuries, the Bowery has been a place of transformation and invention, a gateway for immigrants, a refuge for drifters and dreamers. Described as “a democratic vortex” by Jacob Riis and “the great highway of humanity” by Theodore Roosevelt, the Bowery has been a place of openness and experimentation, vice and deviance, that was also once known as “Devil’s Mile.”
On view from September 24, 2026, through January 31, 2027, the exhibition brings together artifacts and artworks stretching back centuries, from an 1830s hand pump fire engine to a nineteenth century dime museum attraction called the “Feejee Mermaid,” to Jacob Riis’s revolutionary images How the Other Half Lives revealing previously hidden interior views through newly invented flash photography. Underscoring the Bowery as a site of perpetual reinvention, the exhibition will reveal the Bowery’s rich evolution through archival materials, historical artifacts, and through the works of successive waves of artists of all stripes who have lived or worked there, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop, Beats to punks, street artists, and beyond, featuring works by Lynda Benglis, John Giorno, Nan Goldin, Adolph Gottlieb, Keith Haring, Eva Hesse, Robert Indiana, Brad Kahlhamer, June Leaf, Reginald Marsh, Martha Rosler, Bill Sullivan, Cy Twombly, and Tom Wesselman, among others. The Bowery: Devil’s Mile builds on twenty years of research including the New Museum’s own archive and oral history project: The Bowery Artists Tribute and the associated exhibition Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969–1989.
The Bowery: Devil’s Mile is curated by Lisa Phillips, Director Emeritus, with Thalia Stefaniuk, Curatorial Assistant. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog co-published by the New Museum and Delmonico Press with essays by Lisa Phillips and Thalia Stefaniuk, and reflections by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Sara Driver, Debbie Harry, Bob Holman, and Richard Price. |
