Art Club 2000, Untitled (Conrans I), 1992-93. Courtesy the artist and the Estate of Colin de Land.
1991 might have been the year punk broke, but 1993 was just as important for New York's art scene. At least that's the conceit of the exhibit that the New Museum just announced, taking its name from the Sonic Youth album that came out that year and will turn twenty during the show's run. According to a museum press release, the album "captures the complex exchange between
mainstream and underground culture across disciplines, which came to define the art of the era." The exhibit will span all five of the museum's floors; artists include Nan Goldin, Gabriel Orozco, Elizabeth Peyton, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The museum's adjacent Studio 231 space will host a re-creation of Nari Ward's Amazing Grace installation, which originally appeared in an abandoned Harlem firehouse. With its look back at late-twentieth-century New York and the connection it draws between the city's art and music scenes, the exhibit is in line with recent shows like Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery (currently on view in the museum's fifth-floor space); it's also a way for the Museum to catch the '90s nostalgia wave. Here's what we were up to in 1993:
NYC 1993 opens February 13, 2013.