Squatters’ Rights

In the waning hours of the 1970s, flyers announcing a “Real Estate Show” at 123 Delancey Street began appearing on the Lower East Side. This wasn’t a luxury condo viewing, but rather an “art show celebrating insurrectionary urban development.” The leaflet featured a drawing, by local artist Becky Howland, of an octopus clutching a tenement house in each of its tentacles. Above the creature appeared the text: “A building is not a precious gem to be locked—boarded—hoarded.”

The Real Estate Show was internationalist (“It is important for artists to express solidarity with Third World and oppressed people”); allied with struggles against racialized police violence (“The action is dedicated to Elizabeth Mangum, a middle-aged Black American killed by police and marshals as she resisted eviction in Flatbush last year”); and vigilant about art’s uses and abuses by speculators and rentiers (“artists, living and working in depressed communities, are compradors in the revaluation of property and the ‘whitening’ of neighborhoods”). It was also, as the organizers freely admitted in their manifesto, “extralegal.” Though the show was evicted on New Year’s Day, 1980, the morning after it opened, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development offered the organizers the nearby storefront of a shuttered notary public just two weeks later. (It didn’t hurt that on January 8 Joseph Beuys came to a protest called by the artists, demanding that the city’s padlock be removed.)

And so the mythic alternative art space ABC No Rio was born at 156 Rivington Street, taking its name from the remaining letters of its etiolated sign, ABOGADO NOTARIO. This spring, as the org—“in exile” since that building was demolished in 2016— prepares to move into new Paul Castrucci–designed digs at its original address, the exhibition ABC No Rio 45 Years at the Emily Harvey Foundation boisterously retrospected the institution’s antiinstitutional history.

In the large SoHo loft, artworks and ephemera were hung salon-style on almost every inch of wall—the sensory overload a gratifying reprieve from the lugubrious white cube survey. My eye was pulled in hundreds of directions: from an oil stick rendition of a crying cop by Mike Glier (1980) to a beautiful black-and-white studio portrait of an unidentified neighborhood woman by Tom Warren (1981); from a troika of little paintings honing in on the twisted mouths of Republican culture warriors by Max Schumann (c. 1992) to the dozens of posters for ’90s hardcore shows. A section devoted to the period from 1983 to 1990, when artistic and life partners Jack Waters and Peter Cramer co-helmed the venue, featured GAYBC No Rio (2025), Waters’s touching, yearbook-like document of the space’s queer history.

To inaugurate the show, Cramer draped a spray-painted banner reading “Resist” outside the gallery, just above the Guess store—a critique, perhaps, of the corporate capture of oppositional aesthetics. Some passersby might have thought Guess had joined the #resistance, but I couldn’t help thinking of a line Guy Debord wrote in 1957: “Something that changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than something that changes our way of seeing paintings.” Spaces like ABC No Rio advanced a more nuanced argument, insisting on infrastructures for cultural production and exhibition that contest the naturalization of existing land use and affirm the fundamentally creative activity of squatting and other spatial attacks on property. Why must we ask for permission to open a show or to live in an apartment that is sitting empty, accruing value for an absent owner? Comic book artist Seth Tobocman asked and answered this question with his contribution to the exhibition. Painted in 1998, it’s a giant, freestanding cutout of bolt cutters snipping a lock, titled, simply, Space, how-u-get-it.