GIW Highlights Footage from NYC 80s-90s Downtown Scene

In the 80s-90s in New York, a convergence of art, fashion, music, and theater came together in a kind of cross-pollination where creatives influenced each other by virtue of proximity and co-mingling. It was an extraordinary period in New York City, where clubs, storefront galleries, retail stores and the street provided alternative venues for exhibitions and installations of art, performance, music, fashion and dance.

The era was marked by fantastic and elaborate theme parties, typically performed for one night only, making any remaining archival footage one-of-a-kind and extremely rare. Shows like Dali and Gala’s Mad Hatter Tea Party captured the zeitgeist, combining a surreal dinner party with the performance of Joey Arias and Ann Magnuson as Dali and Gala, as did the Fellini Party, with a cast of circus performers and Felliniesque characters in vignettes throughout the club, and Disco Hospital, which included a wild assortment of characters as nurses, doctors, and patients, a stage show and an absurdist video with a nurse accidentally exploding a patient. 

Check out footage of these exceptional and eccentric events, as well as other images from the time at Global ImageWorks.