In its germination, the good old days of, say, 1992, Alleged Gallery was all about the nabe- a very specific place and time when Ludlow Street was still just another Lower East Side gutter of low rent tenement dreams that just so happened to have a phenomenally deep demographic of artists, musicians, film-makers, designers, writers and all around hoodlums. Hell, it was a freak show, fueled by every illicit vice- from powders to pills to prostitutes- that your mommy and minister ever warned you about. As much as Alleged was a community project, it was very much a community in exile, a degenerate horde of expats who had fled the American dream machine and the glitter of Gotham for a little piece of paradise that was simply too smelly, dangerous, inaccessible, dirty and dilapidated for the world of the white and polite. Perhaps Aaron didnít know any better than to open a gallery on a street where the only other merchandise being offered in those days came in folded up little glassine bags with skulls stamped on them. My bet however, is that he knew just what he was doing. There always was a method to his madness, but more significantly, there was just as consistently a defining aesthetic criteria.

Alleged was democratic and inclusive as all venues for emerging artists should be. And, as with anything that is truly organic, it only gathered strength from its curatorial nepotism. Those first shows there, parties for the entire neighborhood to get drunk and misbehave in ways that would have sent any fine art collector who might have accidentally stumbled in there running for their lives, featured some of the best urban folk artists from the early Ludlow Street scene. That a number of them happened to be the same folk pouring the booze at the then obscure art bar next door, Max Fish, well, letís just call that a fortuitous coincidence. No doubt Mr. Rose was just the kind of down and out hipster then that he would have been able to drink for free even if he werenít exhibiting the bartenderís work. And truth be told, there was a radical symbiosis between those two idiosyncratic anti-establishments in those halcyon Ludlow daze that was nothing less than a profoundly potent stew-pot of raw creativity. What was shared in that peculiar space between the music, the art, the words and pictures, the sex, drugs and drinking, was too elusive to be a movement. It was more of a moment, an attitude that was contrary to the dominant trends of cultural consumption, a humor that defied the tyranny of political correctness, and a mode of representation that was imbued with process, casual in its stylizations, and emblematic of a gestural simplicity that all but belied the intensity of emotions and quirky conceptualisms underscoring its manifest intentionality.

From such a sensibility- at once a kind of visual sampling that was akin to the emerging strategies of DJ culture, yet somehow psychically incompatible to the discourse of post-modernism that was also borrowing the same kind of appropriations- Alleged launched Minimal Trix, an exhibition of Skateboard Art in 1993, a show that would come to define an entire generation of art-making before it made the full transition from the streets to the galleries. Subsequently exhibiting the full range of auteur expressions coming up fresh from a new breed of artist, including Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton, Thomas Campbell, Diann Bauer, Jeremy Henderson, Glen E. Friedman, David Aron, Daniel Higgs, Phil Frost, Spike Jonze, Andy Jenkins, Sofia Coppola, Andre Razo, Chris Johanson, Tobin Yelland, Ari Marcopolis, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills, Shepard Fairey, Tom Sachs and many others who first showed their work at this persistently peripheral gallery, with succeeding years of shows tracing the aesthetic edges of folk, fashion, film, performance and music, Alleged Gallery was the unlikely flop-house for every manner of misfit master otherwise barred from the hallowed halls of an ever more institutionalized art market.