New York and No Place Else: Art that Celebrates New York
Alpha 137 Gallery

“Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.”―John Steinbeck, Nobel Prize winner in literature

Alpha 137 Gallery in collaboration with Chashama presents a group exhibition of paintings, editions, posters, and sculptures celebrating NYC by artists including Andy Warhol, Wayne Thiebaud, Red Grooms, Jack Youngerman, Richard Haas, Bob Gruen, Massimo Vignelli, Thelma Appel, and Nancy Graves

About the Artists: 

Bob Gruen is one of the most well-known and respected photographers in rock and roll. From John Lennon to Johnny Rotten; Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones; Elvis to Madonna; Bob Dylan to Bob Marley; Tina Turner to Debbie Harry, he has captured the music scene for over forty years in photographs that have gained worldwide recognition.

For more information about Bob Gruen please visit the artist’s website and follow them on Instagram.

Massimo Vignelli  (January 10, 1931 – May 27, 2014) was an Italian designer who worked in a number of areas ranging from package design through houseware design and furniture design to public signage and showroom design. He was the co-founder of Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Lella. His ethos was, “If you can design one thing, you can design everything,” and this was reflected in the broad range of his work. Vignelli worked firmly within the Modernist tradition and focused on simplicity through the use of basic geometric forms in all his work.

For more information about Massimo Vignelli please visit the artist’s website.

Nancy Graves (1939 – 1995) was an American artist of international renown. A prolific cross-disciplinary artist, Graves developed a sustained body of sculptures, paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints. She also produced five avant-garde films and created innovative set designs.

For more information about Nancy Graves please visit the artist’s website.

Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture. Warhol’s life and work inspire creative thinkers worldwide thanks to his enduring imagery, his artfully cultivated celebrity, and the ongoing research of dedicated scholars. His impact as an artist is far deeper and greater than his one prescient observation that “everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” His omnivorous curiosity resulted in an enormous body of work that spanned every available medium and most importantly contributed to the collapse of boundaries between high and low culture.

For more information about Andy Warhol please visit the artist’s website and follow them on Instagram.

Thelma Appel is a representational and abstract painter who has been working and teaching for more than six decades. Most recently, she was subject of a 50-year career survey (October 2019 -February 2020) at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont, entitled Thelma Appel: Abstract/Observed curated by Mara Williams. She was raised in Darjeeling, India, and educated in London, England, at St. Martin’s School of Art (now Central St. Martins) and Hornsey College of Art before emigrating to the United States in the 1960s.

For more information about Thelma Appel please visit the artist’s website and follow them on Instagram.

Jack Youngerman’s (March 25, 1926 – February 19, 2020) work combines hard-edged geometry with organic forms and fluid contours. Influenced by Henri Matisse while living in Paris in the 1940s and ’50s, Youngerman creates vibrantly painted compositions, occasionally within shaped canvases. His works conjure various associations: Matisse’s paper cutouts, Rorschach patterns, and kaleidoscopic mandalas. After Youngerman returned to New York in the mid-1950s, his work was grouped with and exhibited alongside his contemporaries Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella.

For more information about Jack Youngerman please visit the artist’s website.

Red Grooms is an American artist known for his painted-collage sculptures of both fictional and observed scenes. Characterized by his distinctive stylization and humorous portraits of people, Grooms’s works are constructed from an illustration board and a hot glue gun pieced together into a believable physical space. “In the New York works I’ve done I have tried to make it a kind of portraiture thing where I was really trying to get the texture of what I thought I saw, particularly in the neurosis of the population, and present it in context with the props—the mailboxes, fireplugs, any texture of the city,” he has explained.

For more information about Red Grooms please visit the artist’s website.

Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter best known for his still lifes of edible treats and everyday objects in his singular illustrative style. His most popular subject matter includes colorful cakes, slices of pie, candy pieces, such as lollipops, and the winding streets of San Francisco. Similarly to Edward Hopper, Theibaud’s paintings capture a uniquely American sensibility, and critics have compared his penchant for still life to painters like Chardin and Giorgio Morandi.

For more information about Wayne Thiebaud please visit the artist’s website.

About the Gallery:

Alpha 137 Gallery is a small business that has been operating for more than a decade as an online contemporary art gallery, specializing in secondary market prints, multiples, and unique works and partnering online with Artsy, Artnet, Artspace, Askart and Artsper, and shipping to clients worldwide. They also represent some artists like Thelma Appel and Richard Haas in the primary market and have discovered lesser-known and emerging talents through the Pets of the Pandemic charity exhibition. They are very excited to participate in the Storefront Startup Program because they would like to focus more on curating themed exhibitions and showcasing the art so that people can experience the paintings and prints in person, rather than just from an online thumbnail image.

For more information on Alpha 137 Gallery visit their website or follow them on Instagram and Facebook.

New York and No Place Else: Art that Celebrates New York is part of Chashama’s Storefront Startup program, which is made possible by our partnership with the NYC Department of Small Business Services.