MoMA to celebrate East Village’s Club 57

The legacy of Club 57, the East Village nightclub-cum-alternative space in the basement of a Polish church—where artists such as Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat fuelled their creative energies during the Reagan years—is to be explored in a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The actor and visual artist Ann Magnuson, another club stalwart, will be a guest co-curator of the show, due to open in October 2017. As well as partying hard, the artists subverted the dominant conservative values of the era. The Chinese-American performance artist and photographer Tseng Kwong Chi posed with leading members of the self-declared Moral Majority in front of a crumpled US flag, and documented the club and Haring’s work on the New York Subway. At Art Basel in Miami Beach, large-scale works by Haring from the artist’s foundation are on show at Gladstone Gallery and at Gavlak Gallery.