Longlisted for the National Book Award * A New York Times Notable Book of the Year * Winner of the New York City Book Award * Shortlisted for the Apollo Book of the Year Award * Shortlistedfor the Plutarch Award for Best Biography * Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize * Finalist for the Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award at Interlochen
The never-before-told story of an obscure little street at the lower tip of Manhattan and the remarkable artists who got their start there.
For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art and become foundational to mid-century modernism.
Now, for the first time, Prudence Peiffer pays homage to these artists and the unsung impact their work had on the direction of late twentieth-century art and film. This remarkable group biography, as transformative as the artists it illuminates, questions the very concept of a group or movement, as it spotlights the Slips eclectic mix of gender and sexual orientation, abstraction and Pop, experimental film, painting, and sculpture, assemblage and textile works. Brought together not by the tenets of composition or technique, nor by philosophy or politics, the artists cultivated a scene at the Slip defined by a singular spirit of community and place. They drew lasting inspiration from one another, but perhaps even more from where they called home, and the need to
