“When I was a kid, we used to close in the summer,” says Marc Glimcher, who grew up in
his father Arne Glimcher’s gallery. “All the galleries did. My father
used to put everyone on unemployment.” (The family would live in Hawaii
for the season, with one of his father’s business partners.) “Then
they’d reincorporate the business every September and everyone would get
hired again.”
Not
so anymore. While the collectors are away, the curators will play — at
least, that’s the mantra many New York galleries are adopting this
summer. From Chelsea to Bushwick, quirky and creative group shows are
invigorating what used to be a sleepy time for the art world. Rather
than closing for the season, these days, gallerists work during the off
months in order to get ahead of the demands of the international art
calendar. “You have more activity behind the scenes,” says Sperone Westwater’s
assistant director, Andrew Lee, whose team has met major art-fair
deadlines in the last few weeks. And because many big-ticket buyers are
out of town — “they’re all in Greece or the Hamptons,” Lee points out — directors have more room to get playful in the front of house.
For
their summer show, Lee and his team brought in Eileen Jeng, a former
employee who’s now the operations manager at the nonprofit art
organization RxArt. Jeng secured a loan for a Sol LeWitt sculpture
called “Splotch #3” and built a group exhibition, “Splotch,” around the
piece. The show is “about the controlled and methodical process of
creating a seemingly free-form mark or spot,” she says — and, notably,
it includes artists beyond the gallery’s roster, including Lynda
Benglis, Keltie Ferris and Angel Otero.
Likewise, Glimcher handed responsibilities at Pace Gallery
for the season over to Adrienne Edwards, a Ph.D. candidate at New York
University and an established curator unaffiliated with the gallery.
Edwards didn’t need to worry about finances: “Let me just be very
clear,” she says. “Pace gave me absolute carte blanche.” It’s a funny
term to use, given the show she eventually came up with: “Blackness in
Abstraction,” which assembles a group of monochromatic black works,
created from the 1940s through the present, by artists ranging from
Robert Irwin to Carrie Mae Weems to Oscar Murillo. The exhibition, based
on her dissertation work, explores the role of the color across a range
of artistic practices.
New spaces, too, are embracing the trend. To celebrate his Bushwick-based gallery’s first summer, Hometown’s
Adam Yokell incorporated the season into his curatorial themes. The
works in “Over the Hills” explore aspects of summer — its fleeting
nature, its opportunities to escape, its encouragement to search and
reflect. Also, it’s a “nice time for developing the community around the
gallery,” he says, “creating a summer opening experience that feels
festive.” In that spirit, the Bushwick-based 99¢ Plus Gallery
partnered with its next-door neighbors, Florencia’s Flower Shop, for a
horticulture-rich exhibition, “The Plant Show.” In it, Sean Gerstley’s
work, “Oval Funnel Planter,” is indeed a functional planter, while a
palm plant sits atop Cody Hoyt’s “Four by Four Palm.” And at David Zwirner, artworks by the gallery’s own employees get the spotlight in the aptly titled “People Who Work Here.”
Political
themes have shaped other group shows during this particularly charged
summer. “The Female Gaze, Part Two: Women Look at Men,” at Cheim & Read, features work exclusively by women that attempts to reverse stereotypical gender roles. Meanwhile, “For Freedoms,” at Jack Shainman Gallery,
functions as a headquarters for the nation’s first artist-run super PAC
and features works by collaborating artists. It’s rare for artists to
implicate themselves in the political process so directly, says one of
the super PAC’s founders, the artist Hank Willis Thomas: “We become part
of the system hopefully as a way to critique the system.”
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And earlier this summer, the Lower East Side’s CANADA
gallery riled up the art world with its exhibition title, “Make
Painting Great Again,” which partner Phil Grauer calls “obnoxious and
kind of fun.” The gallery took the theme one step further and designed
some swag. “We had a few dumb hats made, and they’re kind of hard to
wear because people don’t read them. They just see the shape of the
words.” It wasn’t quite the moneymaker he’d hoped — which, perhaps, is
in keeping with the summer group show’s experimental spirit. “Didn’t go
on to T-shirts,” he says. “Just kind of left it.”
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