I love discovering new artists from the past generations of NYC, and so thank-you, Steven Harvey, for this exhibition of paintings and drawings by Bill Rice, a street-smart LES artist from the 1960’s-80’s, who knew everyone, worked with everyone, and made some very tough paintings. With slowly built-up layers of perfectly nuanced and glorious color emanating from the darkness of deep warm and cool blacks, Rice created empathetic tableaux of the down-and out men in his community, the fringe life of gay men, the trucks banging through his streets in the middle of night, the simple hanging-out, watching and being a part of the underworld that was the Lower East Side. But Rice was more than a painter. He performed in plays by Jim Neu, and films by Robert Frank, Jim Jarmusch, Amos Poe, and Jacob Burckhardt, collaborated with Ulla E. Dydo on a book about Gertrude Stein, and hosted performances of all kinds in the vacant lot adjacent to the apartment where he lived. Bill Rice was an artist of a type we rarely see today, making art for the love of creating and the love of his community, not pushing a career or searching for the limelight, being inspired by his world, and in turn inspiring those around him. The exhibition, up through May 13, is well-worth a visit, especially as my photos, automatically normalized and lightened by my camera phone, do not give any sense of the light-filled shadowed darks and subtle color relationships.