Food,10/26-12/5/00, installation view

Food is a documentary exhibition conveying a sense of the time, place, and work made by a group of artists who helped create the vital arts community later known as SoHo. Gordon Matta-Clark, Caroline Gooden, Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris, and Rachel Lew were part of a community of like-minded people who lived and worked in the loft spaces in lower Manhattan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In order to support themselves, show their work and document their activities; these artists -- dancers, poets, musicians, performers, filmmakers, photographers, sculptors, and painters -- established a self-sustaining network which included Food Restaurant, the performance and exhibition space at 112 Greene Street, and Avalanche magazine.

The combined energy of these enterprises supported, documented, and exhibited a group of artists whose performative, and often deliberately impermanent work, developed in the shadow of Minimalism and Pop.

The exhibition includes never before seen video transfers of films made by Gordon Matta-Clark with Robert Frank, Suzanne Harris, and others. Also exhibited are brochures, promotional flyers, issues of Avalanche magazine, taped conversations between artists, and photographic documentation of installations.

Avalanche and the performance and exhibition space at 112 Greene Street eventually turned into the non-profit gallery White Columns, which organized this exhibition.