Longo begins 1981 with his “Men in the Cities” drawings, besuited men and elegant women falling through the air. Exhibitions are about three weeks long, and nine artists have solo shows before summer starts, including Prince, Simmons, Troy Brauntuch, Thomas Lawson, and Sherrie Levine, whose exhibition closes on June 5, just days after Kasper König and Laszlo Glozer’s epic “Westkunst” opens in Cologne, with work by Goldstein, Brauntuch, and Longo on hand.
In November, Sherman exhibits color photographs—unsettling ones that will come to be known as “Centerfolds.” Peter Schjeldahl tells the New York Times years later that he saw them and dashed to a payphone to call his editors, but learned it was too late to pitch a review. “I had to write something that day, and it turned out to be a check,” he says. (He pays in installments.)
It’s 1982. Documenta 7, curated by Rudi Fuchs, brings about 387,000 visitors to Kassel, Germany, in June, plus five Metro artists (Levine, Sherman, Brauntuch, Goldstein, and Longo). Mike Kelley debuts in September with Monkey Island and Confusion, as does Louise Lawler, arranging artworks by other artists and presenting deadpan photographs of other arrangements, and Walter Robinson, with paintings that borrow from pulp novels and movie posters. In 1983 there are shows of Eva Hesse, then Longo, Simmons, and William Leavitt. The gallery moves one block over, to 150 Greene Street in October. “Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America” runs for eight days in 1984, from January 14 through 21.