Jane Dickson began her formal career in 1978 after studying at Harvard University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Having moved to New York, she became a participant in the emerging downtown arts community then beginning to incorporate a number of disparate groups of artists, rock musicians, and hip-hop pioneers. After meeting Charlie Ahearn, Dickson joined Colab; she and Ahearn married in 1983. In 1980, Colab secured funding for and presented the Times Square Show, a multidisciplinary exhibit that gathered the work of over a hundred artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, and David Hammons and which proved to have long-lasting influence on curatorial programming. In 1982, Dickson proposed and coordinated the "Messages to the Public" series for the Public Art Fund, displaying art texts on the Spectacolor LED bill-board in Times Square. After she and Ahearn moved to an apartment above a drag club in Times Square, Dickson began to expand the subject matter of her own work by incorporating scenes of the city's street life. She was later the subject of a 1994 traveling museum retrospective, a 1996 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, and three solo exhibitions at Marlborough Gallery; her work is included in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Walker Art Center, among 22 other major institutions. Charlie Ahearn's trajectory as the filmmaker of hip hop is well-documented. As a parallel discourse, his work as a visual artist, photographer and author sheds light on how uptown hip hop met downtown new wave. The unique life partnership of these two multi-faceted artists is also preserved in this archive.