"The Downtown Book brings the Downtown art scene to life, exploring everything from Punk rock to performance art. The book probes trends that arose in the 1970s and solidified New York's reputation as arbiter of the postmodern American avant-garde. The seven essays featured here examine from different perspectives how Downtown artists constantly pushed the limits of both traditional media and the art world."--BOOK JACKET.

Marvin J. Taylor is Director of the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University. In 1994, he began the Downtown Collection, which documents the Downtown New York scene from 1974 to the present. Lynn Gumpert is Director of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. Carlo McCormick is a popular-culture critic and curator in New York City. Bernard Gendron teaches at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee and writes on jazz, Punk, and the avant-garde. Matthew Yokobosky is a freelance film curator and the director of exhibition design at the Brooklyn Museum. RoseLee Goldberg is founding director of PERFORMA, a nonprofit organization founded to support and develop new visual art performance, and author of "Performance Art from Futurism to the Present". Robert Siegle is Professor of English at Virginia Tech, where he teaches courses in contemporary culture and theory. Brian Wallis is Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York.