The SoHo Underground
Courtesy of On This Spot NYC: Stories of Pioneering Women Artists.
The Einstein Auditorium is less of an auditorium and more of a medium-sized room tucked in the back of a building down a quiet side street in an otherwise bustling area of SoHo. At the On This Spot documentary premiere on Feb. 8, 2025, most of the seats in the room were taken.
The unassuming locale was fitting, as the mission of On This Spot is to uncover hidden pockets of artistic activity throughout the city. The nonprofit is three years into its “mapping project,” which catalogs women’s artistic history in New York City decade by decade, neighborhood by neighborhood. These stories create a colorful collection of bite-sized documentaries, each a roughly five-minute collage of archival footage and old photographs accompanied by biographical narration. Some of the protagonists are well-known (Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama), but many—including the three shown at the premiere—are more niche, underground, or even largely forgotten.
“The idea is we’ll cover New York with hundreds of stories,” said Melissa Rachleff Burtt, Clinical Professor at New York University’s Visual Arts Administration Program, who acted as the event’s host. Loretta Howard, co-founder and Executive Director of On This Spot, who moderated the post-premiere panel discussion, described them as “stories that haven’t been told, that have been overshadowed, that need to be recentered and excavated.”
Lee Bontecou in her studio.
The three documentaries shown were not curated to be a trilogy, though they all took place in SoHo. “These artists may not have anything to do with each other,” Burtt said, “but they’re part of a community.
The first film showcased sculptor and printmaker Lee Bontecou, a pioneer in the 1960s New York art scene. The clips shown—Bontecou welding steel (for which she got evicted); rare footage of her as an older artist after a 25-year hiatus—demonstrated the intensity of her focus and her process. According to panelist Elizabeth A.T. Smith, art historian and author of Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, Bontecou would listen to United Nations broadcasts while she worked, which fueled the anger she channeled into her art.
While many feminists have lauded her for defying gender norms and being one of the first —and, for a while, only—women to have her work shown at Manhattan’s Leo Castelli Gallery, Bontecou did not consider herself a feminist. She wanted to be part of the artist community, not the feminist community. Her work was defined by its “ambiguities and dualities,” according to Smith, and by her love of nature more than by her gender. “She didn’t want to be concerned with gendered responses to her work,” Smith said. “She was more interested in mystery and going as far into infinity as she could.”
The next film, “Women Creatives and the Jazz Lofts of SoHo,” derived a lot of its content from the dissertation of panelist Bentley Brown, a Ph.D. candidate at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Inspired by the free jazz movement of the 1970s, the interdisciplinary scene blended arts and culture in unexpected ways, incorporating music, visual art, dance, and interior design at events in expansive SoHo lofts. “What life was like in these lofts, in a word, was exploration,” Brown said.
Whether gathering for free jazz, modern dance, an art exhibition, or simply for the sake of gathering, members of the jazz loft scene prioritized community and collaboration above all. The scene was “a lifestyle with artwork at the center,” according to Brown. His research involved speaking with his parents, who were involved in the scene, as well as other scenesters who emphasized the importance of the social element as much as the artistic one. (Of his conversations with former jazz loft regulars, Brown said, “You hear about the parties.”)
The third and final film, “The Kitchen,” explored the longstanding nonprofit art center, which started in 1971 in the actual kitchen of a former hotel in SoHo. The Kitchen emerged amidst a wave of alternative spaces in the neighborhood, but it was still one of the first places in the United States to explore performance art. It was the creative home for a multicultural ensemble of women whose experiments incorporated tree surgeon tools, found props, untrained participants, and parodies of Julia Child-style cooking demonstrations. The film captured the space’s “astounding legacy of unexpected delights.”
Courtesy of Lesley Dill.
Panelist and experimental artist Lesley Dill described her own experience creating at The Kitchen in the 1980s. “Moving from Maine to New York expanded the horizons of my imagination to infinity,” she said. The parties everywhere drew her attention from her Henry James novels and toward the possibilities unfolding around her. At that time, performance art was everywhere in the city, particularly among women. “Instead of, ‘Why do performance art?’ it was, ‘Why not do performance art?’” Dill said.
One of Dill’s significant pieces showcased at The Kitchen was the “Speaking Dress,” a paper dress plastered with the title of an Emily Dickinson poem, “The Soul Has Bandaged Moments,” and cut with provocatively placed holes. It translated the words of Dickinson, a famously private person, from quiet musings into bold statements. This feels fitting, given Dill’s own metamorphosis from a shy New England bookworm to a daring SoHo performance artist. Art drew Dill out of her house and out of her shell, as did the culture of the city at the time. “We would get together for coffee, get together for beer, go to a performance and talk about it afterwards,” she said. “It was very friendly.”
The films captured a bygone era of the New York City art scene. “The Kitchen video made me cry,” Burtt said, explaining that she missed how communal the city used to feel.
A strong sense of feeling and community ran through each of the documentaries. It also ran through the Einstein Auditorium; nostalgia and longing for community was palpable in the room, in laughs of recognition and warm embraces between colleagues and old friends.
“Does the kind of artist community shown in these films still exist in New York?” one audience member asked the panelists during the post-discussion Q&A. Brown’s answer, in short, was no. He noted that many of the connections made in art today are not for exploration or dialogue, but for networking and self-promotion, but he added that the former way is still possible.
Courtesy of On This Spot NYC: Stories of Pioneering Women Artists.
“We’re inundated with so much that we become apathetic. We find possibility in things that break our apathy,” he said. “It’s about finding those avenues that make us feel something, and talking to each other, and world-building together. If I were to break it down, [the way to connect] would be intimacy and vulnerability in how we engage with each other and the work that we make.”
Brown posed three questions to his peers in the room and to himself. “As young people, we need to ask ourselves: What does community look like for us today? How do we put the feeling back in artwork? How do we come together in a community to create work that has real feeling behind it? That’s what makes art impactful.”
The premiere of three new short documentaries from On This Spot NYC: Stories of Pioneering Women Artists took place on Saturday, February 8, 2025, 3:00 PM at NYU’s Einstein Auditorium.
