One of the scrappiest and most fondly remembered chapters of 2000s New York art is getting a retrospective. Cooper Union's 41 Cooper Gallery is hosting a group exhibition of more than 70 artists that looks back at Guild & Greyshkul, an artist-run gallery that operated in SoHo from 2003 to 2009 and helped launch a generation of artists, dealers and curators.

The show brings together some who actually showed at Guild & Greyshkul with others who belonged to its wider orbit. Among the names are Mariah Robertson, Dana Schutz, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Ryan Johnson, B. Wurtz, Ryan Muller and Valerie Hegarty, spanning famous and obscure, younger and older artists. It was organized by the gallery's three founders, Anya Kielar, Johannes VanDerBeek and Sara VanDerBeek, at the invitation of Cooper Union School of Art dean Adriana Farmiga and associate dean Yuri Masnyj, all of whom also have work in the show.

Timed with the exhibition, Sara VanDerBeek sat down with Artnet News' Andrew Russeth for an episode of The Art Angle, published October 15. In the conversation she recounts how she and her colleagues built the gallery as young artists in New York: how they made ends meet, why they ultimately decided to close, and what advice she would give to someone opening a space today. Russeth frames the story as a window onto pressures that have only intensified since, as the city grows more expensive and its art scene more averse to risk.

Guild & Greyshkul ran for just six years, but its alumni have remained fixtures of the art world. The Cooper Union show, which runs through October 31, treats that brief run as a case study in artist-led infrastructure: what can be built outside the commercial system, and what it takes to keep it alive.