Nuyorican Poets Cafe 1973

New York City in the 1970s bore witness to a growing number of mostly self-taught artists actively working to avoid the politics and aesthetics of the existing art world. Events like the Summer of Love and the Woodstock Music and Art Fair had launched the counterculture movement of the ‘60s into the mainstream and gave way to a “New Wave” in art and culture, typified by bands like Blondie and the Talking Heads. Countering the trajectory of pop-culture, some subscribed to the “No Wave” movement and renounced the industry surrounding the arts. Elsewhere in the world, the primitive aesthetics of German neo-expressionist painting and the Italian transavantgarde mirrored this disavowal of established norms.

Founded by a group of independent poets in 1973, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe grew out of a similar autonomous sentiment. The Cafe was formed by a group of mostly unpublished writers and poets in the living room of Puerto Rican born writer Miguel Algarin’s Lower East Side apartment. It served as a creative and cultural center for the neighborhood and aligned itself with the burgeoning “Loisaida” movement which called attention to the unmistakeable Puerto Rican identity of the area. The Loisaida movement aimed to overcome the ostracism of Puerto Rican immigrants living in New York and the writing of people like Algarin was at the core of the project. Other notable founders of the Cafe include writer Miguel Piñero who, while incarcerated, wrote Short Eyes, an award-winning play about life in prison, and Ntozake Shange, known for her writing on themes of race and feminism.

In 1975 the Cafe moved to a former Irish pub on East 6th street and in 1981, it took dominion over a former tenement building. New York City had suffered extreme economic difficulty at the end of the previous decade, leaving the majority of Lower East Side tenements abandoned or under government seizure. The Cafe co-opted one such building, as did similar groups of “Outsider” artists like the art collective that opened ABC No Rio on Rivington Street—an exhibition space whose egalitarian curatorial policy was “first-come, first-hung”.

Today, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe still operates out of the same space it has occupied since 1981 and offers programming in music, poetry, and literature.

– Sam Ashman