MAKING DO

Surveys of Just Above Midtown and Edward Hopper capture New York's history.

- HILTON ALS

Even among the many seismic changes that the New York art world has experienced in the past seventy years or so, the legendary gallerist Linda Goode Bryant stands out. The founder of Just Above Midtown, or JAM, the historic gallery that played host to an incredible range of artists of color from 1974 to 1986, Goode Bryant established what she called a "laboratory" a singular place where an artist's meaning and intention could be expressed in an intellectually free ethos and without commercial interference, a down-home, do-it-yourself cosmos for performance art, happenings, and conceptual, rather than narrative-read: ideological art. And what art! David Hammons, Howardena Pindell, Lorraine O'Grady, Senga Nengudi, and Lorna Simpson, among many others, had their first significant New York showings at JAM, while volunteers such as the critic Greg Tate and the historian and curator Lowery Stokes Sims manned the phones.