The Downtown Gallery, directed by Edith Gregor Halpert, specialized in American Scene painting and was another prime venue for the artists of the Popular Front. In 1946 it was located at 32 East 51st Street. It drew considerably more attention from The New York Times that year than did the ACA Galleries. The NYT review of a recent biography (see the above link) claimed that Halpert, a sometimes abrasive and difficult woman who had begun her working life on a department store sales floor, generally featured artists who had been discovered by other galleries.
In late January the Downtown Gallery opened a retrospective exhibition of gouaches, watercolors and drawings by Stuart Davis in conjunction with an exhibition of the artist's work at the Museum of Modern Art. In March it opened a show of recent paintings and drawings by Charles Sheeler, which NYT art critic Edward Alden Jewell wrote in his review of March 10 revealed the artist to be "a quasi-abstractionist, at least an abstract theorist, despite his retention of synthesized natural forms." Sheeler is best known today for his precisionist depiction of industrial subjects. Some of Sheeler's work can be seen here.
Jewell also took note on March 31 of a show of paintings by Paul Burlin at the gallery. In May the gallery featured a show of post-war paintings by six former servicemen: Ralston Crawford, Louis Guglielmi, Jacob Lawrence (images here) Jack Levine, Edmund Lewandowski and Mitchell Siporin. Lavis A. Tinnen and Betty Garrett of "Call Me Mister," which had recently opened on Broadway, sang two songs for the artists and guests at the preview reception. Fortune assigned Crawford to cover the Bikini atom bomb test that summer.
Later that year the gallery had an exhibit of American folk art, a genre with which it became associated. Arthur G. Dove, who died in November, was represented by the gallery according to his NYT obit although he is more often associated with Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, An American Place.