Just Above Midtown (JAM) Archives at The Museum of Modern Art
by Meagan Connolly
Associate Archivist, The Museum of Modern Art
In 1970s New York City, 57th Street was scattered with commercial galleries exhibiting and lauding artwork created by white artists. Mainstream galleries and art institutions were highly exclusive and inaccessible to minority artists, only occasionally exhibiting Black artists. Artists of color, particularly younger, early career artists, were routinely marginalized and not seen as equal to their white contemporaries. A young and ambitious Linda Goode Bryant, then an employee at the Studio Museum in Harlem, heard all her friend’s complaints and said, “Let’s just do it ourselves.”
In 1974 Bryant started her gallery, Just Above Midtown (JAM), at 50 West 57th Street, amid the same galleries that rejected the artists she worked to bring together. Yet Linda started JAM not as a reactionary space, but as an inclusive and autonomous one; not as a gallery only for Black artists, but one for all artists. JAM became a haven and a hub for emerging Black artists working in post-minimal and performance art to create and exhibit their work without fear, supported by a trusting and honest community. Artists who were early participants at JAM include David Hammons, Randy Williams, Valerie Maynard, Palmer Hayden, and Senga Nengudi.
Community was at the heart of JAM. They put on programs like “Brunch at JAM,” which provided a free brunch while visiting artists would lecture, and “The Business of Being an Artist,” a series of programs dedicated to teaching young artists how to succeed in the art market. In addition to their public programming, there were many collaborative projects between artists — so much so that JAM is often described now as more of a laboratory than a gallery.
For the next 37 years, Linda stored the 84 legal-size boxes that comprised the JAM archive at various storage facilities, friends’ apartments, and other locations. By the 2020s, histories of exclusion from art museums and galleries became more well known, trailblazers from the era were celebrated, and many artists from JAM’s history had become internationally known and exhibited. In that context, Thomas T. Lax and Lilia Taboada began planning for an exhibition of the gallery’s history at the Museum of Modern Art titled Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces in 2021. To facilitate research for the show, MoMA negotiated to have the JAM archive brought onsite. In October 2022 the show opened to critical acclaim. The exhibition celebrated the work created at JAM and the family that formed through the artists’ collaborations and communal hardships, and included work previously exhibited at JAM alongside numerous items from the archive.
After the exhibition closed in February 2023, MoMA, with a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, received permanent custody of and formally established the Just Above Midtown Archives. Linda Goode Bryant was brought on as a consultant to provide her insight throughout the processing of the archive, which began immediately in May 2023, and is ongoing. Because the archive has been moved many times, the original order was no longer discernible. As processing progressed, 84 legal boxes became 145 manuscript boxes containing around 3,200 folders, arranged into four series: Artist Files, Exhibitions and Programming, Administrative, and Media.
Rather than relegate JAM’s history to the past, MoMA intends to give it another life by preserving and making accessible the JAM archive. Although JAM is no longer a physical space, it very much remains a spiritual one, and we intend to maintain that space at MoMA. Just Above Midtown Archives will be open to the public for research in September 2024. Along with a finding aid, we will also publish an illustrated research guide to enhance access.
