Hub and spoke. Audio Collective.

I'm looking at a photograph of a group of people in coats and caps on a roof deck.

They're in New York, set against a pattern backdrop of buildings on a casual fall afternoon.

And we can tell from their coats and caps that this is a different New York, that it's the New York of the middle of the 20th century,

where people in these kinds of coats and caps could have a roof deck.

These people are artists.

Artists you would only recognize by their names.

Text on a card mounted next to a painting on a wall

that is beautifully hung and illuminated with a perfect artificial light source.

Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist. But here they are, human beings, sucking down cigarettes,

sitting on a pile of scrap, and encouraging one of their kids to smile for the camera.

MoMA and the Whitney and the Met, where their names would ultimately live, are far, far uptown. But this is their New York. This is Coentee's Slip.

Coentie's Slip was a dead-end street in Lower Manhattan.

It was also home to an itinerant community of scrappy, mid-century artists,

many of whom, as author Prudence Pfeiffer explores in her book,

The Slip, the New York City Street that changed American art forever, evolved together alongside one another.

Because they hung out together.

They were friends.

They helped one another.

They experimented together and helped carry scrap for each other.

And maybe it was the very fact of the community that we know their names today.

Yet when we see those names mounted on a museum wall, we forget that they were ever young and poor and grimy and experimenting and human.

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