Giving Art History the Slip
Stephanie Barron, Art in America
April 2017
Located at the southern tip of Manhattan in the midst of what once was a busy section of the waterfront, Coenties Slip became the home of an important group of painters, sculptors, designers and performers during the 1950s and ‘60s. Those who lived there at some point between 1954 and 1965 (after which most of the buildings were razed), and whose presence contributed to this artistic community, included Charles Hinman, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Fred Mitchell, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, Jesse Wilkinson, Ann Wilson, Jack Youngerman and Athos Zacharias. The artists who gathered at the Slip were drawn by its low rents, spacious lofts and river view, as well as––not least––because it was an area entirely dissociated from the locales of Abstract Expressionism, which reigned, with somewhat oppressive exclusivity, further uptown. […]