Bowery Gallery is an artist-run cooperative gallery founded in 1969 by eighteen young New York artists who, recalling the Tenth Street cooperative galleries of the 1950s, opened a space on the Bowery that gave the gallery its name. Formed to promote contemporary art at a time when abstraction and Pop dominated, the gallery is directed by the collective decision-making of its member artists and describes itself as showing contemporary art unconstrained by commercial pressures, functioning as a force for the expansion of art's traditions. It moved twice within SoHo during the 1970s and 1980s before settling in Chelsea in 2000, where it operates today; membership is selective, with periodic reviews of applicants' original work and preference for artists working within 200 miles of New York City.