Grey Art Gallery

The Grey Art Gallery's location is rich in cultural history. The gallery is housed in the Silver Center (formerly Main Building), on the site on NYU's original home, the legendary University Building (1835–94), where many famous artists and writers, including Samuel Colt, Winslow Homer, George Inness, and Henry James, worked. It was also here that Professor Samuel F. B. Morse established the first academic art department in the U.S.[3]

Between 1927 and 1942, the space now occupied by the Grey Art Gallery hosted A. E. Gallatin's Gallery (later Museum) of Living Art—the first American museum exclusively devoted to modernist art. In exhibiting work by Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp, and artists associated with the American Abstract Artists group, Gallatin created a forum for intellectual exchange and a place where visitors could view the latest developments in art. NYU lacked a permanent museum until 1975, when a generous gift from Mrs. Abby Weed Grey enabled the historic venue's renovation and improvement of the historic venue, and the doors reopened as the Grey Art Gallery and Study Center in 1975.[4]

Founder and patron of the Grey Art Gallery, Mrs. Abby Weed Grey collected some 700 works of modern art on her travels throughout Asia and the Middle East.[5][6][7]

A native of Saint Paul, Minnesota and a graduate of Vassar College, Mrs. Grey established the Ben and Abby Grey Foundation to sponsor artists. She called for a more complex understanding of works by contemporary artists around the world, acknowledging their interest in local popular and folk forms as well as interactions with modernism.[8] Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Mrs. Grey undertook curatorial projects such as Fourteen Contemporary Iranians (1962–65) and Turkish Art Today (1966–70), each of which toured the United States; Communication Through Art (1964), which opened simultaneously in Istanbul, Tehran, and Lahore, before traveling throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Asia, and eastern Africa; and One World Through Art.[9][10] By 1979, Mrs. Grey had become one of American's prominent collectors of Asian and Middle Eastern art.[11]

Mrs. Grey served on the Board of Trustees of The Minnesota Society of Fine Arts (1967–1973) and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design’s Board of Overseers (1964–1983).[12][13] She endowed the Grey Fellowship in Museum Studies at the Walker Art Center, and in 1979, established and endowed The Grey Fine Arts Library and Study Center, a resource in NYU's Department of Art History (formerly Department of Fine Arts).[14]

The gallery was endowed by Abby Weed Grey, who also donated some 700 works of modern art that she acquired during her frequent travels in Asia and the Middle East. Mrs. Grey was especially supportive of Iranian art, which comprises one-fifth of her collection at NYU. She also donated significant holdings of works by artists from Turkey and India. Many of the artists whose works she collected adapted their culture's indigenous aesthetic traditions to contemporary circumstances, and they often blend representation and abstraction.[15]

Parviz Tanavoli, The Last Poet of Iran, 1964

Artists include: Mahmud Ahmadi, Siah Armajani, Jamal Bakhshpour, Kamran Diba, Bijan Dowlatshahi, Ahmad Esfandiari, Mansour Ghandriz, Behrooz Golzari, Marcos Grigorian, Mahmoud Javadipour, Sirous Malek, Morteza Momayez, Mir-Hossein Mousavi Khameneh, Nassar Ovissi, Ru’in Pakbaz, Faramarz Pilaram, Behjat Sadr, Sohrab Sepehri, Masoumeh Seyhoun, Jazeh Tabatabai, Sadegh Tabrizi, Parviz Tanavoli, Esmail Tavakoli, Hamid Zarrine-Afsar, Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi.

Artists include: Mustafa Aslier, Aliye Berger, Nurullah Berk, Sabri Berkel, Sadan Bezeyis, Abidin Elderoglu, Dervim Erbil, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Ahmet Gürsoy, Nevil Islek, Özer Kabas, Füreya Koral, Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid.

Artists include: Prabhakar Barwe, Dhanraj Bhagat, Satish Gujral, Maqbool Fida Husain, Kanwal Krishna, Krishna Reddy, Francis Newton Souza, Vivan Sundaram, Jehangir P. Vazifdar.

The New York University Art Collection, of which the Grey Art Gallery is now guardian, was founded in 1958 with NYU's acquisition of Francis Picabia’s Resonateur (c.1922) and Fritz Glarner’s Relational Painting (1949–50). Today the collection (which includes approximately 6,000 objects) is primarily composed of late-19th and 20th-century works, ranging from Pablo Picasso’s monumental public sculpture Bust of Sylvette to a Joseph Cornell box, Chocolat Menier, from 1952. The collection's particular strength is American painting from the 1940s to the present. European prints are also well represented, with works by Henri Matisse, Joan Mirò, and Picasso, to name a few.

Artists in the NYU Art Collection include: Milton Avery, Ilya Bolotowsky, Sonia Delaunay, Arshile Gorky, Édouard Manet, Francis Picabia, and many others. The collection is especially rich in works by artists working in New York in the 1950s and '60s, such as Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Al Held, Romare Bearden, Hans Hofmann, Alex Katz, Nicholas Krushenick, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, and Bernard (Tony) Rosenthal.[16]