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Since opening its first New York location in 1979, Mr. Chow's has hosted many of the city's top figures in fashion, the arts and music.

Excerpt from Andy Warhol’s Diary, Wednesday, November 14, 1984:

"Cabbed to Mr. Chow’s for Jean-Michel’s party ($7). And it was great. I feel like I wasted two years running around with Christopher and Peter, just kids who talk about the Baths and things, when here, now, I’m going around with Jean-Michel and we’re getting so much art work done.

Jean-Michel became the hostest with the mostest last night. He said it cost him $12,000— the Cristal was flowing."

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Excerpt from Andy Warhol’s Diary, Wednesday, November 7, 1984:

"I went to Private Eyes (cab $7). Scott was at the door, so he let us right in. Madonna was on the platform and since Jean-Michel had once been involved with her, we started to go up, and the bouncer said “Step aside for Mr. Warhol,” and then tried to block Jean-Michel and I said that it was okay, he was with me. And Madonna kissed Jean-Michel on the mouth, but she was with Jellybean, who said he’d heard his pictures in Interview made him look 6’ tall so he was thrilled because he’s 2. And Jean-Michel was moody because Madonna got so big and he’d lost her."

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The Mudd Club was a nightclub in the TriBeCa area of New York City, USA, that operated from 1978 to 1983 as a venue for underground music and counterculture events.

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An icon of New York City nightlife until its doors closed in 1986, Studio 54 was a hotspot for Warhol and his entourage. The club is no longer in operation as it was, but Warhol fans can still visit the building, which now houses the Roundabout Theatre Company.

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East Village became the new SoHo in 1981, when Patti Astor opened up what is widely regarded as the first art gallery in the neighborhood. Astor was a close friend and frequent collaborator with several of the hottest underground rappers, punk rockers, graffiti artists and filmmakers in the city. She chose a run down, East Village tenement building as the site for her new, experimental exhibition space: FUN Gallery. There, she helped jump start the careers of street artists like Lady Pink and Futura 2000, and gave major early shows to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. FUN Gallery started an East Village land rush. Galleries popped up weekly. Within a few years, the neighborhood was the epicenter of art movements as aesthetically diverse as Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Pop and Street Art.

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In 1980, Annina Nosei opened a new gallery location at 100 Prince Street. She was instrumental in launching Basquiat’s career, working closely with him from 1981-1983. Basquiat also used Nosei’s basement as a studio space.

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The East Village Eye was a publication covering arts, music and culture in downtown New York. From May 1979 until January 1987, editions of the East Village Eye were published on a monthly basis; the magazine covered the development of the downtown creative community, in particular the art of Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz.

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The opening of Pat Hearn Gallery in 1984 signaled an important turning point in the East Village aesthetic. The cool, stripped-down paintings of Taaffe and Peter Schuyff, and the more Neo-Surrealist work of George Condo, evoked a stylistic sophistication that seemed to spurn some of the East Village’s proletarian trappings in favor of artworks and galleries that were every bit as polished as their uptown counterparts.

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Opening on June 1st 1980, The Times Square Show was an exhibition organized by the avant-garde artist collective, Collaborative Projects Inc., in an abandoned massage parlor at the epicenter of New York’s entertainment and pornography district. This show launched the careers of artists such as Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Nan Goldin, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith -- and most significantly, was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first show as both graffiti artist “SAMO” and a painter.

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Location of show Ed Baynard exhibition “Fast” July 1982.

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After using the city as his canvas – from making countless quick chalk drawings on empty black subway advertising spaces to creating a Crack is Whack mural in Harlem – Keith Haring applied his bold lines and bright colors to freestanding drawings and paintings. Between 1980 and 1989, the artist achieved international recognition, participating in numerous group and solo shows and producing more than 50 public artworks from New York to Paris. By finding a direct means of expressing universal concepts of birth, death, love, sex and war, Haring created a lasting imagery that has been embraced around the world.

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Hailing from Brooklyn, Basquiat first attracted attention in the late 1970s with the enigmatic graffiti he created under the name SAMO, befriending artists and downtown New York luminaries and beginning to paint and draw with more focused effort. A first public group show in a vacant Times Square building in June 1980 eventually led to his first solo exhibition in 1982. Success among the Contemporary art-loving public was immediate, while critics both lauded Basquiat as a genius and derided him as a product of the newly booming market. In the mid-1980s, the artist collaborated on several works with the most famous artist of the time, Andy Warhol. Basquiat died of a heroin overdose on 12 August 1988, but the influence of his complex aesthetic on subsequent generations of artists remains incalculable.

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By the 1980s, Andy Warhol had already achieved a high degree of financial and critical success; but in his final decade, he saw a second wave of popularity (due in part to his friendships with younger artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat). In 1987, Warhol passed away; the cause of death was complications following surgery to his gallbladder.

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A graduate of the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, Wojnarowicz moved to New York as a young adult in the 1970s; there, he first achieved recognition for his iconic graffiti stencils – depicting burning houses – which appeared on buildings in the Lower East Side. Wojnarowicz went on to become a leading figure in the mixed-media avant-garde movement which emerged from the LES in the 1980s. Most notably, Wojnarowicz and another artist, Mike Bidlo, led the (illegal) takeover of the then-abandoned Pier 34 building for use as an alternative studio and art system community for two years, from 1983-84. Wojnarowicz completed a number of other projects in a range of mediums, including super-8 films, before succumbing to AIDS in 1992.

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An American-Canadian graffiti artist, Richard Hambleton initially attracted public attention by painting faux crime-scene outlines of bodies on pavements. In the early 1980s, Hambleton painted buildings in the Lower East Side of New York City alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, during which time the artist also began to portray iterations of his highly recognized Shadowman figures onto found objects and canvases. As his reputation as a Contemporary artist rose, Hambleton was also struggling with addiction; on a number of occasions, this left him without an income or a studio space. Hambleton passed away in October 2017, at the age of 65.

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American painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel synthesized the postmodern interests in earlier artistic movements such as German Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism, with a heightened sense of experimentation with materiality. His works from the late 1970s and 1980s, alongside those of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Eric Fischl, contributed to the development of American Neo-Expressionism.

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Between 1980 and 1984, Christopher Wool worked as a studio assistant to artist Joel Shapiro, whose dynamic sculptural works in many ways contributed to Wool’s own artistic experimentation. During this time he created a number of abstract paintings, and in 1984 he had his first solo exhibition. His work from around this period largely reflects his early openness to experimentation, as he vacillated between different types and forms of repeating patterns, which were generally produced with a roller stencil—in this way he could utilize familiar, sometimes even commercial, shapes and prints, and through their application to canvas they were decontextualized and viewable abstractly.

In 1987, Wool began creating his “word paintings,” works that he has become most well known for. In these paintings, he stencils black letters onto white canvas, playing with the ways in which the parameters of the canvas inadvertently break phrases or cause sequences of words to run on. In this manner, common phrases must be visually excavated from any aesthetic effect that the painting produces.