The Menil Collection The Menil Collection

Writer, editor, and art historian Prudence Peiffer discusses her first book, The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever and how the Coenties Slip played a role in shaping the artistic journeys of renowned American artists that affected the landscape of Modern Art.

The book is a group biography of a collection of luminous American artists including Chryssa, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist and Jack Youngerman. From the late 1950s to the middle of the 1960s, all of them happened to live in the same place: a collection of former sail-making warehouses on Coenties Slip, a dead-end street in one of the oldest sections of Manhattan, right next to the river.

Prudence Peiffer is an art historian, writer, and editor, specializing in modern and contemporary art. She is Director of Content at MoMA, New York. She received her Ph.D from Harvard University; following a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, she was a Senior Editor at Artforum magazine from 2012-2017, and Digital Content Director at David Zwirner in 2018. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books online, Artforum, and Bookforum, among other publications.

This program takes place in the main building, located at 1533 Sul Ross Street. Additional information regarding accessibility and parking can be found here.

As always, Menil programs are free and open to all.