Lenore Tawney
in ‘The Artists of Coenties Slip’, MoMA, New York
4 October 2024 – Ongoing

Lenore Tawney, Untitled, 1961, Rayon, wool, 160 x 56.8 cm © Lenore G. Tawney Foundation
Lenore Tawney is included in MoMA’s ongoing group exhibition, ‘Artists of the Coentis Slip’. The exhibition focuses on a brief period in the 1950s and ’60s, when an unexpected community of artists lived and worked on Coenties Slip, one of Manhattan’s oldest streets, at the island’s southeastern tip.
The neighbourhood was transitioning from a maritime to a financial center, with older buildings torn down to make way for glass skyscrapers. Drawn by cheap rents, open floor plans, views of the East River, and a sense of collective solitude, artists including Robert Indiana, Ellsworth, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Jack Youngerman. These artists worked in abstraction, figuration, painting, drawing, textiles and assemblage, and although they never formed a movement, each make significant breakthroughs at Coenties Slip that changed the landscape of modern art.