That Eric Alper

Arleen Schloss, the painter, performance artist, video maker, sound poet, and curator whose loft at 330 Broome Street became one of the most important creative gathering places in the history of New York’s downtown art scene, died on May 23, 2026. She was 82.

Born December 12, 1943 in Brooklyn, Schloss studied at the Bank Street College of Education, the Art Students League of New York, and Parsons School of Design before graduating from New York University. She came of age as an artist in the SoHo and Lower East Side gallery world of the early 1970s, performing and exhibiting in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and establishing herself as a performance artist of genuine originality. The New York Times called her performances “superior to much performance art.” The SoHo Weekly News noted that her voice was “musical the way Patti Smith or Yoko Ono are musical.” Neither observation was a small one.

But it was A’s — the interdisciplinary loft space she ran at 330 Broome Street beginning in the late 1970s — that cemented her place in art history. What happened there across those years reads today like an impossible guest list. Glenn Branca performed. Y Pants performed. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s noise music band Gray performed. Eric Bogosian did solo work there. Thurston Moore’s pre-Sonic Youth post-punk band The Coachmen performed there. Liquid Liquid performed. Alan Vega’s band Suicide performed. Carolee Schneemann performed. Ai Weiwei exhibited. The space was, in the fullest sense of the word, a hub — a place where the boundaries between music, art, performance, and film were not so much blurred as declared irrelevant. Schloss did not just host these artists. She created the conditions in which that entire scene could breathe and grow.

Her own work matched the ambition of the space she built. Her sound poetry piece “How She Sees It By Her” earned serious attention in the audio art world and was included in Glenn Branca and Barbara Ess’s no wave anthology “Just Another Asshole” as well as Richard Kostelanetz’s “Text-Sound Texts.” She directed a 24-hour media opera at Ars Electronica in Austria in 1986. In 1989, Nickelodeon hired her to direct fifteen live video excerpts for the animated series Eureeka’s Castle, which won a Cable ACE Award. In 1990, she produced a video documentary on the pioneers of virtual reality featuring Marvin Minsky, John Perry Barlow, Timothy Leary, William Gibson, and Jaron Lanier — a document that now reads as a remarkable piece of cultural history. She filmed a series of interviews with John Cage. She taught in the MFA Computer Arts department at the School of Visual Arts. She did all of this while continuing to curate, perform, and push into whatever new medium was presenting itself.

Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art Library, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Lenbachhaus in Munich, and the Fales Library Downtown Collection at New York University, which also holds her papers. A 2024 documentary by Stuart Ginsberg, ‘It’s A to Z: The Art of Arleen Schloss’, and a 2021 book, ‘Wednesday’s At A’s’, have worked to document what she built and why it mattered. The New York Underground Museum documents her entire oeuvre.

She was 82 years old, and the downtown New York art scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s — one of the most creatively fertile periods in American cultural history — would have looked and sounded different without her at the centre of it.