The book launch of Young, Sleek, and Full of Hell: Ten Years of New York’s Notorious Alleged Gallery will kick off a three-week exhibition of zines, prints, posters, exhibition announcements and other ephemera from the Alleged era in Printed Matter’s Back Room.

In 1992, Ludlow Street was just another Lower East Side gutter of low-rent tenements populated by artists, musicians, film-makers, designers, writers, and hoodlums. At the heart of it all stood Alleged Gallery. Stationed securely outside the institutionalized art world, this persistently peripheral gallery launched-in the ten years it was open-the international careers of countless artists working at the aesthetic edges of street art, fashion, film, performance and music.

As the purveyor of this potent mixture of art, music, sex, drugs, and drinking, Alleged trafficked in irreverence and unlimited freedom. In Young, Sleek, and Full of Hell: Ten Years of New York’s Notorious Alleged Gallery, the history of Alleged’s exhibitions, events and attitudes is chronicled through behind-the-scenes photographs and interviews with the artists, musicians, designers, models, actors, film-makers, curators, gallerists, and collectors who were the scene’s lifeblood. The exhibition at Printed Matter will bring back into the public eye some of the posters, flyers, album covers, and promotional material that circulated in the neighborhood and gave Alleged the legendary status it maintains to this day.

Young, Sleek, and Full of Hell features more than 100 artists, including Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton, Thomas Campbell, Diann Bauer, Jeremy Henderson, Glen E. Friedman, David Aaron, 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, Susan Cianciolo, Sonic Youth, Courtney Love, Unsane, Surgery, Railroad Jerk, Cibo Matto, The Boredoms, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Jim Jarmusch, Harmony Korine, Mark Borthwick, Cameron Jamie, and Terry Richardson.