Westwood Gallery

As the saying goes: teach a person to fish, feed them for a lifetime. Give an artist cheap rent in a sprawling space and a creative community to lean on when the studio cold becomes unbearable, and it’s incredible what can happen.

So many great artists have risen from the lofts along the Bowery, thriving behind big windows in sprawling former industrial spaces. If you want to see what came out of that perfect storm, go to Westwood.

Come for tightly curated shows focused on the artists of the neighborhood, past and present. You’ll see names you usually encounter in museum collections, decade by decade, alongside their friends and neighbors who are lesser-known, perhaps, but worth discovering.

This is the soup of the creative community, the cultural DNA of old-school downtown NYC. We always leave with a sense of NYC that runs deeper than the surface, and a reminder of why so many come, 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, 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, they moved to the Bowery in 2016, where the creative energy of the 1960s still lingers. Their mission remains clear: to frame contemporary art within that living history and keep the restless spirit of the neighborhood alive.