Below Grand

Downtown ingenuity (and a little rebellion) plays out in this 24/7 window gallery and inside a hidden art closet tucked in a restaurant supply store. The art experiments keep brewing at a second storefront space around the block on Allen Street. More than a gallery, this is aa a counterculture in the making.

Here, artists are curators and curators are artists, freely interchanging and moving between roles. Shows are often styled with the drama and flair of a fashion storefront and curated with no singular dominant viewpoint. It feels like experimental seas of ideas, with room for every kind of expression. It’s rare. It’s bold. And it’s so New York.

In 2017, artist and educator Andrew Paul Woolbright (Brooklyn Rail, SVA) started what was then a small, artist-run space called Super Dutchess. It was scrappy, a little wild, and full of heart. In 2020, he changed the name to Below Grand. What started as a solo project is now a living, shifting collective: old-timers and newcomers, teachers and students, all building something bigger than the sum of its parts.