The Painting Center was created in April of 1993 by twelve painters who felt there was an urgent need for a space devoted entirely to the exhibition of paintings. After finding the second floor space on 52 Greene Street in Soho, they worked to prepare it as a gallery space. They erected several new walls and repaired and painted others; refinished the floor and brought in a desk and other necessary items. In September of that year, they launched an inaugural show featuring forty-nine artists including such painters as Jake Berthot, Louise Fishman, Bill Jensen, and Milton Resnick. This exhibition celebrated The Painting Center’s first season and drew attention to it as a new exhibition space.

Situated on Greene Street in the heart of the gallery district in Soho, the Center has a large main exhibition space of 1,000 square feet and a second, smaller space of 200 square feet known as The Project Room. Now in its 13th year, the center has shown several hundred artists in a variety of formats: solo and group shows, shows curated both by outside curators and by The Painting Center members.

Through there have been changes in the original core group of painters, the Center has survived its critical first years and gone on to present a wide range of painters both known and unknown. Reviews of some of the exhibitions have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, The New Yorker, The New Art Examiner, The Partisan Review, Art News, Art Forum, and Cover Magazine. In 1998, the center was also included in Modern Painters magazine’s “100 Gallery Guide 1998″, featuring 100 galleries in New York.