The extensive archives of Jay Gorney Modern Art, a pioneering New York gallery that operated from 1985 to 1998, are now available online for the first time through a collaborative digital preservation project. The gallery, which showcased groundbreaking exhibitions including Lari Pittman's first New York solo show and the initial presentation of Nan Goldin's prints from "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" (1985), represents a crucial chapter in contemporary art history that was at risk of being forgotten.
The digitization effort is the result of a partnership between Independent, which operates art fairs and publishing ventures in New York, and Contemporary Art Library, an organization that evolved from the widely-followed website Contemporary Art Daily. Together, they launched the New York Gallery History Project earlier this year to prevent the erasure of important gallery histories from public memory. The Jay Gorney Modern Art archives serve as the flagship launch for this ambitious preservation initiative.
Forrest Arakawa-Nash, executive director of Contemporary Art Library, explained that the project developed organically from user feedback. "We started hearing more and more from people that were using the site as a de facto archive of recent art history," he told reporters. "We created Contemporary Art Library to answer this apparent need for a trustworthy, high-quality resource for learning about the work of today's artists." The organization began actively collecting materials from closed galleries to prevent corners of art history from disappearing entirely.
Independent founder Elizabeth Dee, who collaborated on the project, cited her personal connection to the gallery scene as motivation. "It's part of my passion of being a former gallerist myself and looking to the East Village scene of the 1980s as a real touchstone," said Dee, who operated her own gallery from 1997 to 2016. She noted that Jay Gorney Modern Art "has a really rich history that is consequential" but observed a troubling trend in how gallery histories are often revised or overlooked.
"One thing I realized is this notion that people are not getting credit for the curatorial work they're doing in galleries if their galleries close," Dee explained. "Often when other galleries take on consequential artists, they will do a kind of revisionism about where they showed, and kind of develop a more linear narrative than most artists really have. It's important for historians to have access to those early shows."
Jay Gorney Modern Art initially opened on 10th Street in the East Village in 1985 before relocating to Green Street in SoHo in 1987, where it remained until its closure in 1998. During its nearly decade-and-a-half run, the gallery mounted exhibitions for some of the era's most important emerging artists, including Catherine Opie's L.A. Freeways and Mini Malls series, Barbara Bloom's conceptual reimagining of the Titanic's ocean-floor debris, and work by Peter Nagy, Roni Horn, Tim Rollins & K.O.S., Jessica Stockholder, and Gillian Wearing. The gallery also featured more established artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Allen Ruppersberg.
Gallery founder Jay Gorney expressed surprise and enthusiasm when Dee approached him about the digitization project. "There are a lot of things in this archive that should be of great interest to artists and scholars," Gorney noted. "I thought it was wonderful because I really applaud the idea." Before establishing his own space, Gorney gained experience through internships with Leo Castelli and positions at Sidney Janis and Hamilton galleries, as well as participation in the Whitney Independent Study Program during 1972-73.
After closing his original gallery, Gorney co-founded Gorney, Bravin & Lee in Chelsea in 2001 with partners Karin Bravin and John Post Lee. That partnership concluded in 2005, and Gorney subsequently became a director at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which assumed the former Gorney, Bravin & Lee space on West 26th Street. Some materials from the Gorney, Bravin & Lee period have been digitized but are not included in the current launch.
The archive contents vary significantly across exhibitions, with some featuring only one or two installation photographs while others include multiple images, individual artwork documentation, and even original exhibition invitations. Unfortunately, many paper materials from Gorney's archive were lost when they were destroyed in basement flooding at the Chelsea Art Building during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The current digital collection draws primarily from boxes of color transparencies and slides that Gorney had stored at his home.
Despite the limitations, Gorney remains optimistic about the archive's growth potential. "It's a living archive and we will continue to add to it. It's not carved in stone at this point," he explained. During the digitization process, he actively reached out to former exhibiting artists, their current galleries, and other contacts to help expand the digital offerings and fill gaps in documentation.
The digitization process required approximately six months to complete, involving careful organization and identification of each item while situating materials within the gallery's chronological history. This represents the largest digitization project undertaken by Contemporary Art Library to date. Gorney reflected on the emotional impact of the process, describing it as "very meaningful and very moving actually—and a little disturbing as one thinks about one's mortality and one's own legacy."
Looking ahead, the New York Gallery History Project will next focus on digitalizing archives from Orchard, which operated on the Lower East Side from 2005 to 2008, and Queer Thoughts, which opened in Chicago in 2012, relocated to Tribeca in 2015, and closed in 2023. The broader platform already includes archives from other closed spaces such as Foxy Production, Off Vendome, Paradise Garage, Cleopatra's, Matthew, and New Jerseyy.
Dee emphasized the urgency of rapid digitization, noting that traditional institutional archives, while safe, often lack resources for timely digital access. "Even though they're in a safe place and can be accessible by appointment, they're not really part of the discourse because they're not available to everyone," she observed. The project launches amid a wave of gallery closures this year, highlighting the ongoing need for such preservation efforts.
Reflecting on the project's broader significance, Gorney acknowledged that his gallery operated during a different era in the art world, when the scene was "much smaller and not dominated by mega-galleries." However, he hopes the archive will demonstrate to current and future gallery operators "that things can be done and approached in many ways, and having an art gallery can be approached in a thoughtful, cerebral kind of way." The project underscores the crucial role galleries play in shaping art history and preserving the market's contribution to cultural discourse.
