The Slip

Longlisted for the National Book Award · A New York Times Notable Book of the Year · Winner of the New York City Book Award · Shortlisted for the Apollo Book of the Year Award · Shortlisted for the Plutarch Award for Best Biography · Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize · Finalist for the Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award at Interlochen

The never-before-told story of an obscure little street at the lower tip of Manhattan and the remarkable artists who got their start there.

For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art and become foundational to mid-century modernism.

Now, for the first time, Prudence Peiffer pays homage to these artists and the unsung impact their work had on the direction of late twentieth-century art and film. This remarkable group biography, as transformative as the artists it illuminates, questions the very concept of a “group” or “movement,” as it spotlights the Slip’s eclectic mix of gender and sexual orientation, abstraction and Pop, experimental film, painting, and sculpture, assemblage and textile works. Brought together not by the tenets of composition or technique, nor by philosophy or politics, the artists cultivated a scene at the Slip defined by a singular spirit of community and place. They drew lasting inspiration from one another, but perhaps even more from where they called home, and the need to preserve the solitude its geography fostered. Despite Coenties Slip’s obscurity, the entire history of Manhattan was inscribed into its cobblestones—one of the first streets and central markets of the new colony, built by enslaved people, with revolutionary meetings at the tavern just down Pearl Street; named by Herman Melville in Moby Dick and site of the boom and bust of the city’s maritime industry; and, in the artists’s own time, a development battleground for Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. The Slip’s history is entwined with that of the artists and their art—eclectic and varied work that was made from the wreckage of the city’s many former lives.

An ambitious and singular account of a time, a place, and a group of extraordinary people, The Slip investigates the importance of community and artistic inspiration, and makes an argument for how we are shaped by it, and how it in turns shapes our work. 

This is a story of place, art, and the human connections that shape history.

• An Unsung Art Community: Discover the circle of friends―including Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin―who quietly changed the art world from a handful of dilapidated warehouses on Coenties Slip.
• American Art History: Explore the pivotal decade between 1956 and 1967 when abstraction, Pop Art, and experimental film collided, fueled by friendship and shared solitude.
• New York City History: Trace the story of a single street from the city’s colonial beginnings and maritime past to the urban development battles between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses.
• The Power of Place: Go beyond the story of a single artist to understand how a shared environment can become one of the most powerful forces for creative inspiration.

Prudence Peiffer is an art historian, a writer, and an editor specializing in modern and contemporary art. She is the Director of Content at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She received her PhD from Harvard University. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, she was a Senior Editor at Artforum magazine from 2012-2017, and the digital content director at David Zwirner in 2018. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Artforum, and Bookforum, among other publications.