Mary Boone, the legendary 1980s art dealer, has co-curated an exhibition titled "Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties" at Lévy Gorvy Dayan on the Upper East Side. The show features over 60 works by artists from her former stable—including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring, and Cindy Sherman—alongside a grid of Andy Warhol portraits of the era's titans. Boone, who was convicted of tax evasion in 2019 and served time, returns to the spotlight with this collaboration with dealer Brett Gorvy, drawing on her firsthand knowledge of the downtown scene.
The exhibition matters because it marks Boone's reentry into the art world's upper echelons after her legal troubles, and it reframes the 1980s as a period of creative ferment rather than mere financial excess. By reuniting Warhol's portraits with the artists who revitalized his career, the show underscores the symbiotic relationships among dealers, artists, and the market that defined New York's art scene. It also highlights how Boone's personal history and access shaped the narrative of that transformative decade.