ABSTRACT
The best way to encounter the New Museum, New York, is by walking east along Prince Street, Soho, to the junction with the Bowery. Boutique eateries and fashion stores occupy the old buildings along Prince Street, but this cosy, gentrified strip, once the immediate neighbourhood of David Bowie, intersects jarringly with a scruffy section of the Bowery, where every other store sells wholesale kitchen and catering equipment. Born in Kentucky and raised in Jacksonville, Illinois, Alanna Heiss was a graduate of the Lawrence Conservatory of Music. In 1971, she set up The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, a New York organisation dedicated to bringing into use, empty or abandoned buildings in order to produce or display contemporary art. The settled, understated and hip character that Heiss established is there. Its informality, absence of glamour and minimal security still makes this an unhurried and relatively low-key experience.
