New Museum’s Bowery Show Puts CBGB Photos and Nan Goldin’s ‘Ballad’ on the Walls

The New Museum sits on the Bowery, and for its fall season it has finally put the street on the wall. The Bowery: Devil’s Mile, which opened Sept. 24, is billed as the first exhibition to trace the history and culture of New York’s oldest thoroughfare, from a Lenape footpath to farms, pleasure gardens, dime museums, a notorious skid row and, later, an artists’ strip. It runs through Jan. 31, 2027, alongside the museum’s big Arthur Jafa survey.

Lisa Phillips, the museum’s director emerita, curated it with Thalia Stefaniuk. The New Museum says it covers the Bowery as “a street, a neighborhood, and a state of mind,” and its cast of characters runs from Peter Stuyvesant and P.T. Barnum to William Burroughs, Eva Hesse and Keith Haring.

The music is where it gets familiar. Art in America says late-1970s photographs of the punk venue CBGB lead into a small room for Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979–96), the slideshow of friends, many photographed in her Bowery loft, which plays with a curated soundtrack. The reviewer calls it the outstanding work in the show and “stunningly raw.” Across from it hangs a wall of 28 portraits by fellow Bowery diarist Billy Sullivan, flanked by works by Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse and Tom Wesselmann.

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Earlier rooms are all ephemera and maps, with an 1836 firefighters’ pump wagon from local archivist Adam Woodward as the centerpiece, and a long gallery of street photography by Berenice Abbott, Weegee and Harvey Wang. Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems pairs 45 silver images of storefronts and gutters with slang for being drunk.

Art in America’s verdict is that the show is compact but “punches above its weight.” Its argument, unstated, is that the New Museum is itself part of the continuum, as much a Bowery institution as the concert halls, sideshows and jazz clubs that came before it. The Bowery: Devil’s Mile is on view at 235 Bowery through Jan. 31, 2027.

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 11, 2026.