All Street Gallery

In 2018, a group of young New York artists began making giant collaborative paintings in Washington Square Park, Union Square, McCarren Park, and Times Square, inviting anyone passing by to contribute. The point wasn't so much the finished painting as the act of making art together.

That grassroots spirit that art can be a tool for self-exploration and community building lives on in All Street's two spaces. The East 3rd Street gallery occupies a former Hell's Angels headquarters, while Hester Street is more about gathering, with student exhibitions, zine fairs, Community Art Days, and supper socials. There's also an online exhibition platform, /virtu.all.

The exhibitions often start with a question. Art at Work: Sanitation & Social Practice explored civic labor; Chaos Theory brought together Black abstraction; and Seeing What Isn't There considered ambiguity, intimacy, and absence.

If you want to know what a younger generation of New York artists is thinking about art, politics, and how to live together, this is your place.

All Street was co-founded by Eden Chinn and Ciaran Short, two New York artists, curators, and educators whose practices cross into activism and community organizing. Chinn works across photography, installation, and bookmaking, exploring how advertising and media shape identity. Short works across art, writing, and grassroots organizing, with writing published in The Independent, Newsday, and Honeysuckle. Both have taught at NYU Tisch, bringing their experience as practicing artists into the classroom and back into All Street.