RYAN LEE

About the Presentation
Black SoHo, presented jointly by Salon 94 and RYAN LEE Gallery, brings together landmark works by Emma Amos, Ed Clark, Norman Lewis, Camille Billops, David Hammons, Vivian Browne, Frederick J. Brown and Jean-Michel Basquiat; artists whose practices contributed to the cultural life of downtown New York from the 1960s through the mid-1980s. Many of these artists were central figures in artist-run gallery spaces, including Just Above Midtown (JAM), the Brata Gallery, and the Hatch-Billops loft—Camille and her husband's namesake space and archive—which gave Black artists a platform outside an otherwise narrow and exclusionary art world.The booth unites rare and museum-quality paintings, sculpture, and works on paper including Amos's woven canvases, Clark's push-broom abstractions, Lewis's gestural oils, Billops's glazed earthenware, and Hammons's early body prints. Complementing the artwork, our digital assets will also feature rare ephemera from the renowned Artist and Influence journal, including photographs, that bring this extraordinary moment in New York's cultural history vividly to life as we work to bring sustained attention to this important moment in 20th-century art history.

About the Gallery
Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee, RYAN LEE Gallery has established itself as a welcoming place of discovery and dialogue for art ranging from post-war to contemporary. Taking a multi-generational approach to programming, the gallery presents innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practice — including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and performance — and has demonstrated a long-standing dedication to feminist, queer, Black, and Asian American narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experience, RYAN LEE champions boundary-pushing artists whose work transcends political, cultural, material, and technical limits. Using its expansive institutional network, the gallery collaborates with museums throughout the United States and abroad, connecting artists' work with prominent private and public collections and major exhibitions worldwide. RYAN LEE has placed work in the collections of institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, the British Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among many others. Gallery artists have been featured in major biennials including the Venice Biennale, dOCUMENTA 13, and the Gwangju Biennale, reflecting the gallery's enduring commitment to building and preserving artistic legacies that leave a lasting impact on art history.