History of the NYU Art Collection
The Grey Art Gallery, New York University’s fine arts museum, enables and encourages transformative encounters with works of art. Engaging with challenging issues in the study of material culture, the Grey serves as a museum-laboratory, sparking interdisciplinary scholarship. Uniquely positioned to cultivate visual literacy and critical thinking, the Grey shares NYU’s fundamental commitment as a global research university to advance knowledge of different cultures, contexts, and histories across time. The Grey also fosters experiential learning through its collections and participates in the cultural, intellectual, and environmental spheres of NYU’s Global Network, of New York City, and of the broader world. In 2025 the Grey will celebrate its 50th anniversary.
The creation of the New York University Art Collection was inspired by A.E. Gallatin’s Gallery (later Museum) of Living Art, which opened in 1927 on the same site the Grey currently occupies. As the first institution in the U.S. to exhibit work by living artists—including Picasso, Léger, Mirò, Mondrian, Arp and members of the American Abstract Artists group—Gallatin’s Museum provided an important forum for intellectual and artistic exchange. When the Museum closed in 1942, Professor Howard S. Conant of NYU’s Department of Art Education bemoaned the lack of original art on campus and initiated the NYU Art Collection in 1958. The collection expanded quickly, with many sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs installed throughout the campus. With a fast-growing academic art collection joining the artistic milieu of Greenwich Village—where New York School artists like Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Ad Reinhardt lived and worked alongside NYU’s impressive faculty of artists, art historians, and scholars—NYU continued to play a crucial role in the city’s cultural life.
The university remained without a permanent museum until 1975, when a generous gift from Abby Weed Grey enabled renovation and improvement of the historic space, and the doors reopened as the Grey Art Gallery. This gift, along with the donation of her prescient collection of contemporary art from the Middle East and Asia, greatly augmented the university’s art holdings and provided a space for temporary exhibitions. In 2021 the NYU Art Collection again significantly expanded thanks to a donation of approximately 200 artworks by Downtown New York City artists from the collection of Dr. James Cottrell and Joseph Lovett.
For nearly 50 years, the Grey has produced numerous exhibitions and publications on the NYU Art Collection, including New York Cool (2008), a survey of Lower Manhattan’s disparate art world in the 1950s and early ’60s; Abby Grey and Indian Modernism (2015), which explored the vital art scene that blossomed after Indian independence in 1947; Inventing Downtown (2017), the first show ever to survey this vital period from the vantage point of its artist-run galleries; and Modernisms (2019), an examination of how artists from Iran, Turkey, and India engaged in global discourses around key issues of modernity.
Source: Grey Art Gallery's Press Release, 2022.
GREY ART GALLERY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003
