Westwood Gallery

Give an artist cheap rent in a sprawling space with high ceilings and large windows, and a creative community to lean on when the studio cold becomes unbearable, and you don’t just make room for art. You make room for possibility.

Westwood Gallery honors that legacy. It’s a love letter to the artists who rose from the lofts of the Bowery, SoHo, and Tribeca in the 1970s and '80s and built the neighborhood’s creative backbone.

The shows are tightly curated, often focused on the artists of the neighborhood, past and present. You’ll see names you usually encounter in museum collections, alongside their friends and peers who never stopped working, even after the spotlight moved on.

It’s the soup of the creative community, the cultural DNA of old-school NYC. We always leave with a sense of NYC that runs deeper than the surface. A reminder of why so many came and why so many stay.

Westwood Gallery has been part of downtown NYC’s cultural fabric for three decades. Founded in 1995 by James Cavello and Margarite Almeida, and joined by now-longtime director Dana Altman in 1999, the gallery has always been as much about neighborhood as it has been about art. After starting in Soho, Westwood moved to the Bowery in 2016, a stretch of street where the creative energy of the 1970s and ‘80s still hums beneath the surface. Its mission remains clear: to frame contemporary art within that living history and keep the city’s restless spirit alive.