These institutions are a reminder that exciting art is being made and shown all across the country — and of the benefits of going local.
The past year has seen pandemic-triggered migration patterns in the art world: As members of New York’s cultural elite moved out of town, at least temporarily, a number of the city’s art galleries responded in kind, opening satellites in places like Palm Beach, Fla.; East Hampton, N.Y.; and Aspen, Colo. The idea of gallerists following potential buyers is perhaps not so surprising (if a bit depressing), but the trend still amounts to a sort of decentralization. It is also a reminder that good galleries, of course, need not be in New York — and of the fact that, though the majority of press, foot traffic and sales still revolve around just a handful of mega-institutions, there are plenty of interesting and important American art spaces that exist beyond the city and the seasonal playgrounds of the one percent.
T’s 2021 Art Issue
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- Artists on artists to know, and maybe even collect.
These places are part of a long tradition of galleries tuned in to both the wider art world and their own communities — and that have been or continue to be significant players in both. The Hyde Park Art Center, in Chicago, was established in 1939 and, in the 1960s, was host to a trio of important exhibitions from the Chicago Imagists, whose work was known for a surreal and singular comics-informed sensibility; in the late 1970s, San Francisco’s New Langton Arts exhibited many of the artists who would go on to become the biggest names in the then-nascent time-based video and installation art movement, among them Nam June Paik, Vito Acconci and Paul McCarthy; and, at the end of last century, the Providence, R.I., space Fort Thunder not only incubated the influential noise band and art collective Forcefield but also provided a rough template for living, making art and hosting happenings that would come to influence a whole generation of warehouse-dwelling young people.
More recently, though even before the pandemic, galleries started in garages and attics in the middle of the country have made their way to international art fairs, while certain established art-world characters have decamped to smaller cities to open up spaces. Without the financial overhead and territorial ruthlessness inherent to New York, these sorts of spaces are often able to take risks, emphasize engagement and carve out a real niche for themselves. What’s more, many of the trends that partly defined the past year — remote work, online sales — will no doubt march on in some form or another, likely only adding to their viability. “I think this last year has put some wind in the sails of cultural scenes all across America,” said John Riepenhoff of Milwaukee’s Green Gallery, one of 12 standout non-New York-based outfits outlined below. “People are feeling empowered to be anywhere, and not feel like they’re missing out.”
Bas Fisher Invitational, Miami
The name of this Miami space, which shows a mix of local and international artists, is a combination of the surnames of its co-founders, the artists Naomi Fisher and Hernan Bas. They chose it because “we thought it was hilarious and sounded like a fishing tournament,” says Fisher, who is now the sole director. In the time since its inception in 2004, the gallery has moved multiple times — in true Miami fashion, one former location now houses the second floor of a Versace store — and achieved full 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, which has made it eligible for larger grants and allowed Fisher to orient its programming away from the whims of the art market. It currently exists in a nomadic configuration that puts on pop-ups and site-specific installations and engages the community in a variety of ways. These initiatives include Waterproof, a series of site-specific artists’ projects created in collaboration with another nonprofit, Bridge Initiative, that address environmental issues affecting South Florida, and the gallery’s artist-helmed Weird Miami bus tours, which were created in response to Art Basel Miami, whose visitors, Fisher says, have an experience of the city that is “the equivalent of going to New York City and never leaving Times Square.” The tours have taken on a life of their own, and often include more performative elements, like when the choreographer Shaneeka Harrell dressed up as Cassius Clay and led a group on a tour of the boxer’s daily training routine before ultimately adopting the persona of Muhammad Ali. 644 Collins Avenue, Miami, basfisherinvitational.com.
Dateline, Denver
“Right now we’re a little beacon of light because there aren’t too many galleries left — it’s all breweries,” the artist Jeromie Dorrance says of his space’s role in what is known as Denver’s RiNo Art District, which does indeed include a number of craft breweries, as well as cannabis dispensaries. He started the space in 2014 with the artist Adam Milner, who now lives and works in New York. For Dorrance, though, a stint in London only strengthened his resolve to focus on art being made by those back home. “I decided that Dateline should just be this leaping-off or branching-off point for local artists,” he says. The building it’s housed in also contains a number of art studios, and a recent exhibition focused on portraits of underground nightlife by the Denver-based artist Shadows Gather. And the mixed neighborhood does have its perks: The nearby Ratio Beerworks provides free refreshments for openings and, Dorrance says, “I’ve had several people, pot tourists, come in and buy art.” 3004 Larimer Street, Denver, ddaatteelliinnee.com.
Dragon, Crab and Turtle, St. Louis
In 2017, the artist Katherine Bernhardt purchased a warehouse space in the Midtown area of St. Louis — she needed a place to store the 60-foot-long mural she’d created for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The artist, who grew up in the city, then transported the contents of her previous storage space, in the Bronx, to the warehouse, which contains a street-facing front area that seemed to have potential. “It was perfect for an art gallery, so I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to do an art gallery,’” says Bernhardt, who opened the space last year after having painted the floor tiles with her signature motifs (Xanax bars, cigarettes, eyeball-like shapes shaded with flecks of dirty pink) and installed zigzag overhead lights that look like something out of the diner on “Saved by the Bell.” With that same freewheeling attitude, she’s shown everything from works by the young Kansas City, Mo.-based artist Bianca Fields to an exhibition of small paintings that Bernhardt had personally collected from Brazil. “We kind of just do whatever we want,” she says. 2814 Locust Street, St. Louis, dragoncrabandturtle.com.
Embajada, San Juan, P.R.
The two-floor building that, since 2015, has housed the San Juan, P.R., gallery Embajada used to be, among other things, a sex-toy shop and a strip club. The gallery currently rests on the ground floor, while the upstairs space, which is also run by the curator Manuela Paz and the artist Christopher Rivera, is a new concept store that focuses on books, art and apparel, including socks, shirts and totes by the artist Juni Figueroa’s brand Warevel Socio. (Poles previously used for dancing have been repurposed as clothing racks.) When the pair started the gallery, there was a dearth of contemporary spaces on the island, but they’ve helped grow a scene by pushing the work of local artists into realms beyond the island — Paz and Rivera, who split their time between San Juan and New York, where they run Embajada Foyer, a small apartment outpost in Brooklyn, have participated in over 25 international art fairs. This means that the gallery has more than earned its name, which is Spanish for “embassy.” “Sometimes we actually get calls from people looking to renew their passport,” says Paz. 382 Calle Teniente César Luis González, San Juan, P.R., embajadada.com.
Et al., San Francisco
In an atypical turn of events, Et al. participated in an art fair before it had a physical space. At the time, the name was a catchall for the curatorial activities of Aaron Harbour and his wife, Jackie Im, who were invited to show at NADA Miami in 2012 and got a crash course in logistics when they ended up selling some paintings by the artist Facundo Argañaraz within the first few minutes of the fair. “It was like, ‘OK, so what, do I hand it to them? Oh, no, no, I have to ship it back to San Francisco and then to L.A. or wherever.’ We really hadn’t thought any of it through,” says Harbour. But they soon became pros, acquiring, with Argañaraz, their then partner, a physical location, in a basement beneath a dry cleaner in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in 2013. Their efforts straddle the line between being more exploratory and project-based — last year, the trio put on an exhibition of drawings by the artist Mattea Perrotta inside the Nintendo game Animal Crossing: New Horizons — and those befitting of a more straightforward commercial gallery, though Harbour, Im and their current third partner, Kevin Krueger, maintain full-time day jobs. This, says Harbour, allows them to stick to artists they truly believe in and, as Harbour puts it, “keeps us from going to openings where we know we don’t like the work.” 620 Kearny Street and 2831 Mission Street, San Francisco, etaletc.com.
Good Weather, North Little Rock, Ark., and Chicago
“Good Weather can seem convoluted to people from the outside,” the artist Haynes Riley says of the gallery he runs with his sister, Erin. Launched in 2011, it had its first show in 2012 with “Shark Week,” an exhibition of mixed media dealing with the ubiquity of portrayals of violence in American media by the artist Tony Garbarini that was held in the siblings’ older brother’s garage in North Little Rock, Ark. Erin came on board in 2015 and in 2019, two years after a show for which the artist Mariel Capanna turned the garage walls into a permanent and ongoing fresco, the duo expanded their operations to Chicago. From those humble beginnings, Good Weather began to interface with the global art world — it’s staged exhibitions with Pei-Hsuan Wang, who specializes in conceptual sculpture and lives between Asia and the U.S., and Raque Ford, who is based in New York and has an exhibition at the Manhattan gallery Greene Naftali on the books for next year. This September, Good Weather will share a booth at Liste Art Fair Basel with a gallery from Chengdu, China, called A Thousand Plateaus Art Space. All of this has helped the Rileys build a collector base. Still, while those kinds of relationships haven’t moved as quickly in their hometown, it’s important to them to keep roots there, and they continue to do one show a year in the garage, along with an additional public exhibition elsewhere in their home region every year. 4400 Edgemere Road, North Little Rock, Ark., and 1524 South Western Avenue, #121A, Chicago, goodweather.llc.
The Green Gallery, Milwaukee
The Green Gallery began its life in an attic in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee in 2004. Now set in a former pizza place on the East Side, it’s grown to become a sturdy bridge between the city and the larger contemporary art community, appearing at a list of international fairs and exhibiting work from locals alongside more widely known names including Michael Williams and Anicka Yi. One of the gallery’s founders, John Riepenhoff, was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where he presented lower body molds that functioned as vehicles to showcase the work of other artists. Riepenhoff speaks of trying to maintain a balance between building an inclusive space and tending to “the fragility of these small communities, of the avant-garde art scenes.” But in operating in a city the size of Milwaukee, he says, “we can build strategies that kind of negotiate both.” 1500 N. Farwell Avenue, Milwaukee, thegreengallery.biz.
LVL3, Chicago
LVL3’s proprietor, Vincent Uribe, views his space as a vehicle for fostering connections within a larger Chicago art community that, when he first moved to the city from California in 2008 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, felt slightly cliquish. To that end, a majority of its programming over the past 11 years has taken the form of two- or three-person shows, mostly featuring artists who didn’t previously know each other, and often facilitated by a robust online art publication run by the gallery, whose Artist of the Week series, Uribe says, is a way of letting him “do a studio visit without having to physically do a studio visit.” Additionally, Uribe, who lived in the Wicker Park space for the first 10 years of its existence — his former bedroom is now used as an office and guest room for visiting artists — also manages two galleries at Arts of Life, a nonprofit dedicated to artists with disabilities. “It kind of follows this pattern that I’m interested in,” Uribe says, “building these networks that aren’t so insular.” 1542 Milwaukee Avenue, 3rd floor, Chicago, lvl3official.com.
Mariane Ibrahim, Chicago (and Paris)
“Chicago makes sense,” Mariane Ibrahim says about her gallery’s 2019 shift to the Midwest, after having been in Washington for seven years. “The role the gallery plays within the city is to reinforce an already existing and strong art community.” Even before its relocation, though, the gallery had become known as one of the most reliable and influential proponents of artists belonging to the African diaspora. Last fall, it exhibited work from the rising Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo, and is currently staging the debut solo show of Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze, a Nigerian-born, Philadelphia- and Brooklyn-based artist who makes collaged drawings on paper. Another recent development was Ibrahim’s decision to open an outpost in Paris, which in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s served as a refuge for various Black American expats and has more recently been a flash point in the ongoing drive for the repatriation of African art. It’s something of a homecoming for Ibrahim, who grew up between Somalia and France. 437 North Paulina Street, Chicago and 18 Avenue Matignon, Paris, marianeibrahim.com.
Reyes | Finn, Detroit
When Bridget Finn was considering moving back to the Detroit area, where she grew up, to work with Terese Reyes on her gallery, Reyes Projects, she had a gut-check moment. “One of my good friends, when I was really grappling — because I had such a life in New York — said, ‘You know, it’s not normal that you talk about Detroit every day.’” And so she went, and the New York art world veterans — Finn had been a director at Mitchell-Innes & Nash and Reyes a director for Marlborough Contemporary — built a program of their own, showing artists including Eddie Martinez and Tyson and Scott Reeder. In 2019, the gallery was officially rechristened Reyes | Finn and moved from Birmingham, Mich., to a former community athletics center in downtown Detroit. (The duo chose to leave the basketball court floor markings untouched.) “There’s something unique about this place where it really is part of your being,” says Finn. The second iteration of Art Mile Detroit, a citywide digital art exhibition showcasing the work of over 60 local galleries that Reyes | Finn organizes in partnership with Cultural Counsel and Red Bull Arts, is on now. 1500 Trumbull Avenue, Detroit, reyesfinn.com.
Stella Jones, New Orleans
“I could never find what I wanted in New Orleans,” says Dr. Stella Jones, a collector turned gallerist who opened her namesake space in a Place St. Charles building in the city’s Central Business District 25 years ago with her husband (who died in 2013). In the ensuing decades, it’s accrued a national reputation as a hub for Black American art — Beyoncé included the gallery in a directory of Black-owned businesses released alongside her 2020 single “Black Parade,” and the gallery’s blockbuster anniversary exhibition, “INspired: 20 Years of African American Art,” showed work by Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence, and 68 other artists. Jones estimates that her collector base is roughly 80 percent out-of-towners. “A lot of New Yorkers come to New Orleans to get African-American art,” says Jones, who, for that reason and others, doesn’t often participate in fairs. “My clients know where I am. I’m of the mind that if you build it, they will come, because they have come to me.” 201 St. Charles Avenue, #132, New Orleans, stellajonesgallery.com.
Tif Sigfrids, Comer, Ga.
Tif Sigfrids has made a habit out of opening ever-cozier locales. Three and a half years ago, she moved her namesake gallery from Los Angeles to the second floor of an old building in Athens, Ga. Then, not long after the pandemic hit, she moved it about 20 miles outside of the city to Comer, population 1,271. Even with a beloved bakery and a few other businesses, Comer is a bit sleepy, but in some ways this has proved beneficial. The owners of Sigfrids’s building sit on the City Council, which recently gave the gallerist the go-ahead to shut down the street for the June 12 opening of a show featuring George Porcari’s 1970s photographs of Los Angeles, for which she brought in the Athens-based food group Mouthfeel to cook pizzas in a portable oven out of the back of a truck. It’s precisely these kinds of events that attract those from other places, she has found. “There’s this whole tourism element to the gallery now,” says Sigfrids, who also has a show up at a temporary New York space at the moment, and is planning a minifair with the New York artist Adrianne Rubenstein — Art Comer — to take place in Comer next year. 83 East North Avenue, Comer, Ga., tifsigfrids.com.
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12 Galleries That Aren’t in New York or Even L.A. - The New York Times
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