Steven Englander, Leader of an Outsider Art Outpost, Dies at 63

Steven Englander, who helped lead the pioneering Lower East Side cultural center ABC No Rio for more than 25 years, directing the anarchistic, fiercely independent organization during a long clash with New York City over the occupancy of a crumbling building that ultimately preserved the group’s presence, died on Dec. 12 in Manhattan. He was 63.

His death, in a hospital after a lengthy battle with a lung disease, was announced by No Rio. In a statement, the organization praised him for helping to create “a sanctuary for New York activists, artists, and musicians through the simple act of believing that what you had to say was relevant, powerful, and, if given a platform, transformative.”

ABC No Rio, an activist-minded collective born out of the New Year’s Eve takeover of an empty city-owned building for a guerrilla art exhibition in 1979, has long provided a venue for outsider and D.I.Y. art and culture. It has hosted eclectic, sometimes experimental programming including art shows, poetry readings and eardrum-splitting punk matinees. The singer-songwriter Beck, the punk band Bikini Kill and the performance artist Karen Finley were among the notable acts to perform there early in their careers.

But No Rio’s story is equally about its contentious battle for a home, one that began with the break-in of the vacant building on Delancey Street on the city’s Lower East Side by a group of artists to mount a show — fittingly, a critique of gentrification called “The Real Estate Show.”

City officials immediately kicked the artists out of the building but offered them part of a ramshackle tenement, also owned by the city, a block north on Rivington Street. The organization took its name from the remaining legible letters of a Spanish-language sign across the street that had bore the words “ABOGADO” and “NOTARIO.” (Only half of the first O was visible, leaving a C.)