Culture of New York City

[6][7][8] The city is the birthplace of many cultural movements, including the Harlem Renaissance in literature and visual art; abstract expressionism (also known as the New York School) in painting; and hip hop,[9] punk, salsa, freestyle, Tin Pan Alley, certain forms of jazz, and (along with Philadelphia) disco in music.

The performers associated with the Greenwich Village scene had sporadic mainstream success in the 1940s and 1950s; some, like Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers, did well, but most were confined to local coffeehouses and other venues.

In July 1969, Newsweek magazine ran a feature story, "The Girls-Letting Go," describing the groundbreaking music of Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Lotti Golden and Melanie, as a new breed of female troubadour: "what is common to them are the personalized songs they write, like voyages of self discovery, brimming with keen observation and startling in the impact of their poetry."

Many of the major disco nightclubs were in New York, including Paradise Garage, Danceteria and Studio 54, attracting notable followers from the art world, such as Andy Warhol, the fashion industry like Karl Lagerfeld, as well as socialites, musicians and intellectuals.

Hip hop first emerged in the Bronx in the early 1970s at neighborhood block parties when DJs, like DJ Kool Herc, began isolating percussion breaks in funk and R&B songs and rapping while the audience danced.

[9] People like Kurtis Blow and LL Cool J brought hip hop to the mainstream for the first time, while so-called East Coast rap was defined in the 1980s by artists including Eric B.

Major New York stars emerged to go on and produce multi-platinum records, including Puff Daddy, Jay-Z and The Notorious B.I.G., along with acts like Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, Big L, and Busta Rhymes.

Each week, more than 100 musicians and ensembles – ranging in genre from classical to Cajun, bluegrass, African, South American and jazz – give over 150 performances sanctioned by New York Transit at 25 locations throughout the subway system.

[31] The 1913 Armory Show in New York, an exhibition which brought European modernist artists' work to the U.S., both shocked the public and influenced art making in the United States for the remainder of the twentieth century.

The abstract expressionists abandoned formal composition and representation of real objects to concentrate on instinctual arrangements of space and color and to demonstrate the effects of the physical action of painting on the canvas.

Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol (1930–1987), Larry Rivers (1923–2002), and Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular culture—Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, comic strips.

[36][37] The industry is also present in neighborhoods known for their art galleries such as DUMBO, where dealers representing both established and up-and-coming artists compete for sales with bigger exhibition spaces, better locations, and stronger connections to museums and collectors.

Many major artists have created public works in the city, including Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, Nam June Paik, and Jim Power the "Mosaic Man."

"[38] The name originated from a subway tunnel running underneath the Central Park Zoo that was the haunt of very early "oldschool" graffiti writers like ALI (Marc André Edmonds), founder of The Soul Artists.

Breakdance became an influential street dance style that emerged as part of the Hip Hop Movement in African-American and Puerto Rican communities in the South Bronx in the early 1970s.

Popular speculations of the early 1980s suggest that breakdancing, in its organized fashion seen today, began as a method for rival gangs of the ghetto to mediate and settle territorial disputes.

[41] It later was through the highly energetic performances of the late funk legend James Brown and the rapid growth of dance teams, like the Rock Steady Crew of the Bronx, that the competitive ritual of gang warfare evolved into a pop-culture phenomenon receiving massive media attention.

Parties, disco clubs, talent shows, and other public events became typical locations for breakdancers, including gang members for whom dancing served as a positive diversion from the threats of city life.

[citation needed] Many musicals in New York became seminal national cultural events, like the controversial 1937 staging of Marc Blitzstein's labor union opera The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles and produced by John Houseman.

With subway riders looking on, the actors chatted amiably about Christmas, exchanged gifts and signed for a package delivered by a United Parcel Service delivery man who entered the scene at the West 34th Street stop.

The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature," as James Weldon Johnson called it, was between 1924, when Opportunity magazine hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance, and the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the start of the Great Depression.

The work of black Harlem writers sought to challenge the pervading racism of the larger white community and often promoted progressive or socialist politics and racial integration.

Various movements down through the years have centered on avant-garde publishing enterprises such as Grove Press and Evergreen Review, as well as unnumbered zine-style pamphlets and one-off literary productions still available in independent bookstores today.

Virtually all creators and workers employed in the early comic book industry were based in New York, from publishers to artists, many of them coming from immigrant Jewish families in the Lower East Side and Brooklyn.

New York also served as an inspiration and home for much of America's non-superhero comic books, famously starting with cartoonist and Brooklyn native Will Eisner's many depictions of everyday life among poor, working-class and immigrant New Yorkers.

SculptureCenter, New York's only non-profit exhibition space dedicated to contemporary and innovative sculpture, re-located from Manhattan's Upper East Side to a former trolley repair shop in LIC, renovated by artist/designer Maya Lin in 2002.

The museum commissions new work and presents challenging exhibits by emerging and established, national and international artists and hosts a diverse range of public programs including lectures, dialogues, and performances.

Throughout the five boroughs the city is home to many distinct communities of Indians, Irish, Italians, Chinese, Koreans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans,Salvadorians, Caribbeans, Hasidic Jews, Latin Americas, Russians and many others.

From the sophisticated and worldly metropolis seen in many Woody Allen films, to the hellish and chaotic urban jungle depicted in such movies as Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, New York has served as the backdrop for virtually every conceivable viewpoint on big city life.

By the city's crisis period in the 1970s and early 1980s, however, films like Midnight Cowboy, The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, Marathon Man, Cruising, Dressed to Kill, and Death Wish showed New York as full of chaos and violence.