Amid a wave of New York gallery closures over the past four years, more artists are finding themselves without representation and support, sometimes at short notice. Joseph La Piana, a Brooklyn-based artist known for his taxicab-yellow sculptures made from stretched rubber, was working on a large-scale installation in Italy when he was told that Marlborough Gallery, which was sponsoring the exhibition, had folded.
The exhibition, Frequency, consisted of six site-specific sculptures in mostly primary colours that engaged with the leafy garden of Orto Botanico Corsini, a 16-acre botanical garden in Porto Ercole, on the coast of Tuscany overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. La Piana also installed two huge works on the property of Forte Stella, a 16th-century fort, along with 13 works inside the fort’s citadel. The distinctive yellow La Piana uses in the works in his Tension series is particularly striking against the blue of the sea surrounding the fort.
“For me, it was really about looking at the site and thinking about how my work can cohabitate in an environment that already existed,” La Piana tells The Art Newspaper.
Discussions around the project began several years ago between La Piana, Sebastián Sarmiento, then the director of Marlborough Gallery’s Chelsea location, and Alessandro Corsini, the president of the botanic garden whose family—longtime Italian nobility—has owned the land for generations. It was initially conceived as a sort of first solo exhibition for La Piana with Marlborough, curated by Sarmiento along with Georgina Pounds, an adviser to Orto Botanico Corsini.
Repetitive
“We were looking for something that just is decentralised from the entire art fair circuit, which has gotten repetitive,” Sarmiento says. “A lot of galleries and dealers are pursuing these types of experiences, particularly during the summer.”
The team was hard at work on the project when they got word in April that Marlborough would close its galleries in New York, London, Madrid and Barcelona, and cease all exhibitions and representation of artists and estates in the primary art market. The gallery said only a fraction of the team would stay on to sell off its inventory, which is rumoured to be valued at around $250m.
“It was really a shock to everybody. The news came to all four galleries at once. It was kind of a sudden announcement,” Sarmiento says. One of his first calls was to La Piana, and then to Orto Botanico Corsini.
“There had been a tremendous amount of preparation for this exhibition; we had also gotten involved with the Italian government and Forte Stella,” he says. “We just decided to do it independently.”
Sarmiento, La Piana and Orto Botanico Corsini were able to cover the gaps in funding left after Marlborough’s sudden closure, and took on additional responsibilities that previously would have been the job of the gallery. Frequency ran from June until August.
Second time round
It was not La Piana’s first time fielding the closure of a gallery. He was previously with Chelsea’s Robert Miller Gallery “for many years” before it lost its space in 2016, he says.
“I never really committed to any one gallery along the way because I always wanted to feel like it was the right relationship,” La Piana says. “We’re in the age of mega galleries and art fairs and auctions and very, very large productions. But ultimately, at the very essence of everything, it’s about a relationship between dealer and artist.”
Sales in the private gallery sector slowed in 2023, according to the latest Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, released in March. Aggregate sales are estimated to have fallen to nearly $36.1bn, down 3% year-on-year. New York gallery closings seemed to reach a peak that year, from decades-old Chelsea dealerships to trendy Chinatown spaces shuttering, including Alexander and Bonin, Cheim & Read, Denny Gallery, Foxy Production, JTT, Malin Gallery and Queer Thoughts. (Encouragingly, the report also noted that the opening of new commercial galleries has outpaced closures in recent years: during the second half of 2023, the number of art galleries and non-antique dealers with employees in the US was 5% higher than in 2020 and 2021, when that figure fell slightly at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.)
Shoring up support
Petra Cortright is a multidisciplinary artist based in California who had worked with Foxy Production, the beloved New York gallery opened by Michael Gillespie and John Thomson. Foxy Production was known for taking risks with video art and other media that few New York dealers supported. The gallery’s closure in 2023 after 20 years was lamented by many as a blow to the city’s downtown scene. But Cortright says she was not as badly impacted by the gallery’s closure last year as many artists may have been because she works with many different galleries and dealers at a time; at the moment, she says, she is represented by six.
“I don’t want to have all my eggs in one basket,” Cortright says. “Galleries closing is very scary. People have kids. This is people’s livelihoods. People need to eat.”
Stefan Simchowitz, a notorious collector and dealer based in Los Angeles, serves as a central go-to for Cortright’s work and helps her with the business side of being an artist, along with things like obtaining materials for her work and shipping.
It’s difficult to be an artist, but it’s also hard to be an art dealer
“This may be unpopular to say because it’s difficult to be an artist, but it’s also hard to be an art dealer,” Cortright says. “They are travelling [for] what seems like half of the year and fees are so high for art fairs these days. There is so much pressure on dealers. It’s hard for everybody.”
While Simchowitz’s sometimes shrewd dealings with emerging artists have hurt his reputation in some corners of the art world, Cortight says she trusts Simchowitz and says surrounding herself with people who understand the economics of the art market has benefited her career and allowed her to focus on her practice. “I really try to separate the art market from my practice and making work every day, so I can sleep at night,” she says.
Rolling with the punches: Dana Sherwood had three solo exhibitions with Denny Gallery, starting with Crossing the Wild Line (pictured) in 2016, before the gallery abruptly closed last year
Courtesy the artist, Denny Gallery
For other artists, keeping art market anxieties at bay can be difficult when their main representative suddenly closes shop. Dana Sherwood—a painter, video, installation and conceptual artist—showed with Denny Gallery from 2016 until its sudden closing last autumn. “It came as quite a shock. I just had a show there the year before,” Sherwood says. “That was really hard, and it was really sad. If I had had an upcoming show, it would have been devastating.”
Denny Gallery was among the first in the recent wave of spaces to decamp from the Lower East Side and Chelsea to Tribeca, now a “monster” for galleries, Sherwood says, and gave her an opportunity to develop experimental installations. “I’m so grateful that I was able to show things [at Denny Gallery] that were really not commercial,” she says. “That’s something it seems really gets lost when those kinds of galleries close.”
Sherwood had already taken the advice of older artists to seek work outside New York City. She has a gallery in Frankfurt and is working on projects in Italy and throughout Europe, she says. She also moved to the Hudson Valley five years ago, which she says has completely transformed with new galleries and art spaces. While Sherwood hasn’t landed a new gallery in the city, she is working on a show next year with Geary Contemporary in Millerton, New York.
“No control”
New York gallery closures did not stop in 2023. In 2024 so far, spaces including the Fortnight Institute, Washburn Gallery, David Lewis Gallery, Deli Gallery and Simone Subal Gallery have also shut. As recently as June, the heavyweight gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash announced it would close its space on West 26th Street in Chelsea and transition into what it described as a “project-based advisory space”.
Both Cortright and La Piana say their advice for artists is to prioritise their work, even amid the precarious state of commercial galleries. “We have no control over the economics of the gallery system,” La Piana says. “Focus on your work, be in your studio, do as much as you can as a human being, first and foremost. Everything else will present itself along the way.”
The Chicago-based painter Leah Ke Yi Zheng worked with David Lewis for three years before the gallery announced in May it would shut down. Lewis was the first dealer she had ever worked with, and she became close with him and Mary Howard, the gallery’s director. Lewis continues to advise and manage Zheng’s ongoing projects until she settles with another primary gallery, she says. Zheng turned to her work to help her cope with the changes.
When the gallery closes, my practice doesn’t stop
“From my own kind of reflection, I found that when the gallery closes, my practice doesn’t stop,” Zheng says. “We had a good momentum, intense momentum; there were always things going on with a deadline. I took the chance to intentionally slow down and didn’t want to commit to anything. When the gallery closed, I was sad, but I still found myself coming to the studio every day and continuing to develop work.”
Sherwood’s advice to artists grappling with the loss of a dealer’s support is to reach out to their community for new opportunities and for support. “There’s an instinct to be quiet about it, like it’s shameful, to keep it to yourself,” she says. “It feels like it takes half your career to actually get gallery representation, and then you have to start all over again.”
Valerie Hegarty, an artist based in New York whose work spans mediums from painting to sculptures and installations, experienced her gallery closing for the third time in her career last year when Chelsea’s Malin Gallery abruptly shuttered. In 2009, during a market-wide downturn, two separate galleries in London and New York that were showing her work both closed. Her experiences in 2023 and 2009 were very different because of the way the dealers handled the closures, Hegarty says.
“More recently, the gallery was not transparent, and seemed like it just got in over its head with debt. That was more chaotic because we weren’t really forewarned,” Hegarty says. The directors of her earlier gallery, Guild & Greyshkul, “came to my studio and told me, in person, that the economy was starting to affect their sales, and they decided to close the gallery so they didn’t lose their savings”. she says. The owners also gave Hegarty a list of all her collectors and files they had on her, with invoices and other documentation. The transparency helped her get back on her feet and soon after she had galleries reaching out to represent her, she says.
Since Malin Gallery closed just more than a year ago, Hagerty has been slower to commit to a new gallery.
“Since I’m more mid-career now, I don’t feel in a rush to get a gallery right now. Back in 2009 there was no Instagram and I didn’t interface with many of my collectors directly,” she says. “But at this point, I’ve had a 20-year career. I have a lot of collectors, so I actually reached out to them with available work, and just started selling directly. I would like a gallery at some point to have shows and everything that comes along with having a gallery, but back in 2009 it felt more urgent to get one quickly, and now it doesn’t.”
Hegarty tells artists facing gallery closures to keep control of their inventory and store their own work if possible, warning of the possibility of a gallery’s unpaid storage bills locking up their work indefinitely. She recommends all artists keep tabs on their collectors, and try to maintain some level of contact with them so they can follow to another gallery.
“That was the biggest thing I didn’t understand, I just thought the gallery did the business while I made the artwork,” Hegarty says. “But those relationships are going to keep you supported throughout your career. With collectors, curators, artist friends and also with Instagram, you can have a certain level of visibility without a gallery.”