Artists on the Bowery, Part 6: Reframing the Edge

Why does a painting have to be square or rectangle? Why does it have to sit flat against the wall? Why pretend it isn't just an object — a thing in the room with you? In the 1960s, these questions hummed along the Bowery from one giant industrial loft studio to another.

The artists in Artists on the Bowery, Part 6: Reframing the Edge, several of whose studios once stood where the new New Museum is now, spent decades making these questions their practice.

Will Insley’s Wall Fragments, a series of black-and-white truncated triangles and trapezoids, spread across the wall like a sequence of propositions. They have crisp, meticulously painted lines sliced across their surfaces.

Alan Steele’s line up of three black triangles looks like a pared down, schematic view of sailboats chasing each other in a regatta. The middle one is interrupted by a single taxicab-yellow wedge, which alters the equilibrium and brings you back to New York.

Ron Janowich’s circular paintings call to mind vinyl records on a wall in a producer’s studio. Look very close: the surfaces are built up with tiny shellacked grid-like patterns that move them out of stillness.

You notice the hard-edged, faceted geometries of Charles Hinman’s 3-D canvases first — the colored glow behind them second. Hinman paints the backs with color that glows up the wall. It’s the one place in the show where color breaks loose. The object broken free of its edges.

The painting doesn't end where the canvas ends. The painting is an object. The object is three-dimensional. It’s a beautiful thing that exists in space. With you. Nothing more, nothing less.

Artists on the Bowery is an ongoing series at Westwood Gallery for artists who lived and worked around New York's Bowery Arts District from the 1960s to today. Curated by James Cavello, the series tracks the people who turned the Bowery from an industrial strip into one of the most important art neighborhoods in the country. This is the sixth installment, Reframing the Edge, with Charles Hinman (1932 - 2026), Will Insley (1929–2011), Ron Janowich (b. 1948), and Alan Steele (b. 1940).