Image: Weegee, The Foreman Of The Devils Was Peeved… because the assistant devils were not in costume, 1945. © Weegee / International Center of Photography
The New Museum is devoting an exhibition to the street it calls home. ‘The Bowery: Devil’s Mile’, which the museum presents as the first exhibition to trace the cultural history of New York’s oldest thoroughfare, opens on the museum’s second floor in late September 2026 and remains on view through January 31, 2027.
The museum describes the Bowery as one of the most infamous yet least examined streets in the world. Over the centuries it has been a Lenape footpath, a route for farms and cattle drives, a district of racetracks and pleasure gardens, and an entertainment strip lined with theaters, concert halls, tattoo parlors and dime museums. In the twentieth century it became known as a notorious skid row, and more recently it has served as the backbone of an artists’ community. The exhibition approaches it as a street, a neighborhood and a state of mind.
Historical material sits alongside art. Objects named by the museum include a hand-pump fire engine from the 1830s, the ‘Feejee Mermaid’, a nineteenth-century dime-museum attraction, and Jacob Riis’s photographs from ‘How the Other Half Lives’, which used the then-new technique of flash photography to reveal interiors that had rarely been seen. Riis once called the Bowery “a democratic vortex”, while Theodore Roosevelt described it as “the great highway of humanity”.
The second strand is the work of artists who lived or worked on the street, spanning Abstract Expressionism and Pop, the Beats and punk, and street art. Artists cited by the museum include Lynda Benglis, John Giorno, Nan Goldin, Adolph Gottlieb, Keith Haring, Eva Hesse, Robert Indiana, Brad Kahlhamer, June Leaf, Reginald Marsh, Martha Rosler, Billy Sullivan, Cy Twombly and Tom Wesselmann. Howard Greenberg Gallery, which highlighted the show in its newsletter, notes that photographs by Weegee and Allen Ginsberg are also on view.
The project draws on some twenty years of research, including the New Museum’s archive, its oral history project The Bowery Artists Tribute and the earlier exhibition ‘Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969–1989’. It is curated by Lisa Phillips, the museum’s director emerita, with curatorial assistant Thalia Stefaniuk. A catalogue co-published with DelMonico Books contains essays by the two curators and reflections by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Sara Driver, Debbie Harry, Bob Holman and Richard Price.
Related programs include a Visionaries talk with Lucy Sante on October 7, a ‘Weirdo Night on the Bowery’ on December 10, and a conversation between Sara Driver and Lee Quiñones on January 7, 2027.
