Alternative exhibition space

Often comprising a place converted from another use, such as a store front, warehouse, or factory loft, it is then made into a display or performance space for use by an individual or group of artists.

"[1] A prominent wave of alternative spaces in the United States occurred in the 1970s,[2][3] with the first spaces established in 1969, including the Taller Boricua, founded by Puerto Rican artists in New York, Billy Apple's APPLE, and Robert Newman's Gain Ground, where Vito Acconci produced many important early works.

Some date the start of the tendency from 1970, when 112 Greene Street[6] was founded in New York and with the early curatorial work of Alanna Heiss.

[16] Hundreds of artists enacted those spaces, including Jim Nutt, H.C. Westermann, Ed Paschke (HPAC), Leon Golub, Nancy Spero (CAC), Hollis Sigler, Vera Klement (Artemisia), Phil Berkman and Gary Justis (N.A.M.E.).

[17] Among the factors contributing to the demise of alternative spaces in the late 1980s in the USA was the reduction of public funding for artists and for the arts.

[18] The net result of the rightward ideological movement in government – with its open hostility to non-traditional art – was that 'alternative artists' were not only de-funded, they and the galleries that featured them were prominently criminalized.

[21] In Europe the culture of alternative exhibition spaces differs somewhat from the situation in the United States and has a strong root in the squatting counterculture, which is not illegal in every European country.

In Moldova, coalition of independent cultural sector developed Casa Zemstvei as an alternative exhibition space in 2012.