Saturday, April 16, 2016

A British Designer Creates an Art Show Around the Bathroom

Art

A British Designer Creates an Art Show Around the Bathroom

By OSMAN AHMEDAPRIL 5, 2016

Clockwise from left: Claire Barrow’s “Do Ghosts Get Flu,” 2016; “Untitled (toilet roll),” 2015; “Untitled (neon 2),” 2015. Credit Courtesy of M.Goldstein gallery

In February, the 25-year-old British fashion designer Claire Barrow staged a London Fashion Week presentation called ”The Retro-Spective,” which placed her knitwear and sculptural garments inside a mock museum — complete, even, with captioned plaques and a fake gift shop. It demonstrated that Barrow — who has garnered positive attention since she debuted her line two years ago — has a strong interest in art.

Now, she has ventured into the actual art world as she prepares to open her first solo exhibition, “The Bed, The Bath & The Beyond,” at M. Goldstein Gallery in east London’s Hackney neighborhood on April 17. “It started with thinking about the fact that being spiritual is one of the worst things you can be today,” she says, sitting in a cafe near her studio, referring to what she perceives as a general cynicism in the digital age. “It’s hard to have faith these days. Me and my friends take life for granted and think we’re invincible. We think that nothing bad will happen to us and that we’ll be fine and cozy, no matter how much we drink, eat crap food and fail to look after ourselves.”

The result is a mixed-media show that explores the parallels between religious anxieties and modern-day social ones. The bathroom is a central focus: Barrow will transform the cubicle-like gallery space into an art-filled interpretation of one. “There’s an everyday mortality to it,” she says. “One of the most spiritual things we do is washing ourselves, going to the toilet and brushing our teeth. We fear germs and uncleanliness the same way that we once feared the devil, and we like the ritual and feeling of being baptized.”

On view are an illustrated shower curtain and a roll of toilet paper, which she completely unraveled and drew onto with markers before carefully rolling back. There are also metallic surfaces and figurative neons, a medium she chose for its clinical, ghostly light. (“You can’t hide from yourself in the bathroom,” she says.) When it came to technique, Barrow drew on her experience of working with garment fabric. “I use it as a blank canvas, and that’s how I approached these pieces,” she explains, before adding that she also applied her usual process of photographing her work once it’s finished. “I made a series of photographs of me wearing the shower curtain — like a look book for the art. I used myself as the subject because it feels so indulgent. This whole process is about making work for yourself about your own feelings.” She adds: “Before, I was asking myself, as a fashion designer, can I be an artist? I’m now asking myself, can I be an artist — and also a fashion designer?”

Fashion vs. Art

The Opinion Pages

Fashion vs. Art

Op-Docs

By ANDREW ROSSI APRIL 15, 2016

When I first discovered the power of documentaries, one film that truly inspired me was “Unzipped,” a quintessential fashion documentary. To make this film, the director, Douglas Keeve, followed one of the era’s most successful high-fashion designers, Isaac Mizrahi, as he planned his fall 1994 collection. Mr. Keeve’s romantic connection to his subject seems to inform every gorgeous black-and-white frame of 16-millimeter film. This type of character-driven story can make for a riveting movie, and as a filmmaker I am captivated by figures who can draw my camera’s lens in a similarly magnetic way.

The editor of Vogue, Anna Wintour, is one of those rare people. So when I had the opportunity to enter her world and follow her work with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, I embraced the challenge of capturing an icon of popular culture. But equally exciting was the prospect of unpacking many complex assumptions that go into our culture’s celebration of fashion, through a combination of vérité filmmaking and analytical argument.

This Op-Doc goes behind the scenes at the Met and the celebrity-laden gala Ms. Wintour holds there each spring for its Costume Institute. In both this short and parts of my related feature “The First Monday in May,” I have tried to retreat from the fanfare — the layers of organizations, fans and consumers that make the fashion industry chug along — and ask why and how fashion occupies such a vaunted position in our culture and economy. I think the answer lies somewhere among the stunning works of painting and sculpture inside the Met. Here, works of fashion are interpreted in an art historical context that elevates what we are looking at beyond a consumer good or star vehicle. As I hope you see through the beautiful costumes in this film, ranging from antiquity to the red carpet frocks of Rihanna and Lady Gaga, fashion is certainly capable of serving as art — if you know where to look.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/opinion/fashion-is-not-trivial.html?emc=edit_th_20160416&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=66671639&_r=0

'Squad Goals' by Steven Klein for W May 2016

Squad Goals
W May 2016
Photographer: Steven Klein
Stylist: Edward Enninful
Makeup: Pat McGrath
Hair: Shon Ju
Models: Aamito Lagum, Amilna Estevao, Irina Shayk, Kayla Scott, Maria Borges, Tami Williams,Ysaunny Brito, & Katie Moore
Tags: Aamito Lagum, Amilna Estevao, Edward Enninful, Irina Shayk, Katie Moore, Kayla Scott, Maria Borges, Pat McGrath, Shon Ju, Steven Klein, Tami Williams, W Magazine, Ysaunny Brito

Editorials

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'Squad Goals' by Steven Klein for W May 2016

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‘Well-Edited Memorials of Wanderlust’: A Brief History of British Conceptual Art

Retrospective

‘Well-Edited Memorials of Wanderlust’: A Brief History of British Conceptual Art

By Alex Greenberger Posted 04/15/16 4:29 pm

Margaret Harrison, Homeworkers, 1977.

©MARGARET HARRISON/TATE, PURCHASED 2011

In honor of Tate Modern’s survey of British Conceptual art, “Conceptual Art in Britain 1964–1979,” which opened earlier this week, below are excerpts of reviews from the ARTnews archives. All of the artists discussed are included in show, which runs through August 29.

Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967.

©RICHARD LONG/DACS, LONDON/TATE, PURCHASED 1976

“Richard Long at Modern Museum”
By April Kingsley
May 1972
Richard Long’s [Modern Museum] seven concentric rectangles of red mud on the floor of a small gallery relate directly (as did his spiraling mud footpaths at the Guggenheim) to the surrounding architectural space. The result resembles something like an Indian sand painting based on a Frank Stella configuration, and does not resonate as sculpture. It does, by virtue of having walked into existence, relate to the other, more conceptual, works in this mini-retrospective. In an odd way, many of these works—collages of juxtaposed statements, maps, diagrams, and photographic documentation—have more sculptural connotations than the mud pieces… As his X’s, spirals and rectangles “walked into” the landscape over the years seem to indicate, it appears that Long wants to defy Picasso’s dictum that “Art is what nature isn’t” by fusing art and nature in a manner much like that of the builders of Stonehenge, though far less permanently. The configurations he imposes on the landscape can’t have that meaningful longevity, but their ephemeral beauty is touching.
“Susan Hiller at Pat Hearn”
By Eleanor Heartney
Summer 1988
Philosophers have long contended that science, far from being an objective account of preexistent phenomena, itself creates phenomena in the process of describing them. This show by British Conceptual artist Susan Hiller employs the format of scientific documentation to explore that issue.
The walls of the gallery were lined with the mounted displays and charts of Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, which documents, categorizes, and analyzes a set of picture postcards devoted to “Rough Sea” images of the British Isles. As Hiller explains in the exhaustively detailed notes accompanying the piece, the ubiquitous “Rough Sea” postcards views according to various factors, such as whether the image is photographic, painted, hand-colored, or framed and accompanied by a caption, and has developed a system of types of images.

John Hilliard, Sixty Seconds of Light (detail), 1970.

©JOHN HILLIARD/TATE, PURCHASED 1973

“Hamish Fulton at Maureen Paley Interim Art”
By William Feaver
May 2005
For this exhibition, [Hamish] Fulton displayed his usual mix of photographs, inscriptions, and résumés of locations seen and journeys taken. Like Richard Long, with whom he is inevitably compared, Fulton likes to convey the impression that his work draws together the personal account, the desire to accomplish tasks, and the perspectives of terrain and cosmos.
So in huge letters, white on gray, running the length of a gallery wall, he spells out “water,” adding the information that in a period of two months, three years ago, he walked from Bilbao, in northern Spain, to Rotterdam, on the North Sea, via several major European water sources, such as the Rhine.
…
His foraging and explorations have accumulated an extraordinary dossier of well-edited memorials of wanderlust.

Roelof Louw, Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges), 1967.

©ROELOF LOUW/COURTESY ASPEN ART MUSEUM, 2015/TATE, PRESENTED BY TATE PATRONS, 2013

“David Tremlett at Gering & López”
By Barbara Pollack
December 2008
British artist David Tremlett is best known for his wall drawings—site-specific images that wear away with time or eventually get painted over. Both ephemeral and memorable, these images are intended to encapsulate the artist’s equally fleeting experiences as he has traveled around the world. The abstract compositions function surprisingly well as picture postcards, conveying the tone and color of various locations without being too specific.
…
Tremlett risks becoming merely a tourist in his world of his own creation, letting sensations skitter along the surface, and not delving beneath. But one work, Kolkata (2008), is deeply disturbing. For this “snapshot” of Calcutta, the artist smeared the wall with a thick rectangle of black grease applied like ripples of water and finished it with a border of vertical stripes along the bottom edge. It was simultaneously beautiful and gross, alluring and repellent—a minimalist work with maximal impact. Kolkata is as difficult to forget as it must have been to remove from the gallery’s wall.
“Victor Burgin at Galerie Thomas Schulte”
By Alicia Reuter
September 2012
In this thought-provoking retrospective of three decades’ worth of film, photography, and text-based work, British artist Victor Burgin, one of the founding fathers of Conceptualism, asserted his intellectual might, as well as a surprising ability to transform the mundane into rich, sensual imagery.
The show opened with Burgin’s first juxtaposition of text and image, Performance/Narrative (1971), which consists of 16 framed photographs and one framed text. The black-and-white gelatin prints depict a small desk, a chair, a lamp in a mysterious office, while the text describes various obscure narrative possibilities.
…
In the last room, eight diptychs titled Zoo 78 (1978) paired unsettling images, often of women in various states of undress, with mundane shots of the courtyards, street signs, room interiors, and buildings that surround the Berlin Zoo. Short texts from Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky and the Marquis de Sade created a sybaritic element, suggesting Burgin’s interest in acts of voyeurism.
“Michael Craig-Martin, the Godfather of British Conceptual Art, Comes to Dallas”
By Nana Asfour
April 2015
“Everybody was raising everybody else’s game,” Craig-Martin said of that time. “There was a chemistry that was very unusual. I knew it was special. I can honestly say that I did let the thought pass through my head that this could be the next generation of British artists, but it never occurred to me that they would achieve the kind of success that they did.” Craig-Martin has kept in touch with nearly all of them. “The amazing thing is that there was a point a couple of years ago where they were all the age that I was when I taught them,” he said, laughing.
While Craig-Martin is proud of his association with the YBAs and is happy to discuss his relationship with them, then and now (“I think I was quite an effective teacher,” he said without reservation), he hasn’t rested on the laurels of this period of his life. Rather, since he made his iconic conceptual work An Oak Tree (1973)—a glass of water installed on a shelf and accompanied by text that makes a case that the glass is, in fact, an oak tree—he has been forging ahead in his own work. He has built an impressive art career for himself, and is now represented by Gagosian, one of the top galleries in the world. Unlike many of his students, his success has been rather slow coming, though he isn’t complaining. “One of the things I realize now is that the hardest thing about being an artist is being able to sustain a career over a lifetime, and not everybody is able to do that.” If anything, this year is proof that he is.

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Wuzhen Is the Chinese Art Hub You’ve Never Heard Of

Best known for its cobbled streets, quaint bridges, and oodles of old-world charm, Chinese water town Wuzhen is confidently carving a niche in contemporary art.

Artsy Editorial

Frances Arnold

Apr 15th, 2016 8:45 pm

Zhang Dali, The Foolish Old Man Who Moved Mountains.

One of several water towns in eastern China to be dubbed the “Venice of the East,” Wuzhen lacks its European namesake’s international standing when it comes contemporary art—and that of its nearby Shanghai, too. However, the Wuzhen International Contemporary Art Exhibition, featuring a who’s who of artists, curators, and advisers, is set to put the picturesque town firmly on the map. Titled “Utopia/Heterotopia,” the debut edition of the multi-site exhibition is the latest in a string of initiatives expanding Wuzhen’s reputation from a locale for selfie-stick-wielding throngs to soak up its undeniable charm to a place primed for a very different sort of cultural tourism. Located some 130 kilometers southwest of Shanghai—a distance quickly covered by high-speed train—the town could become a new arts hub for China.
Wuzhen’s transformation is the brainchild of one Chen Xianghong. The president of private entity Wuzhen Tourism Co., Ltd., and chairman of Culture Wuzhen Co., Ltd., Chen has been steadily revamping and repositioning his 1,300-year-old home town since taking up a post as director of the city’s tourism development committee in 1999. Cultural preservation has been at the forefront of Chen’s activities. This being China, “preservation” means that many of the apparently ramshackle wooden and stone structures that lend the place its appeal are reconstructions, crafted from reclaimed historical materials. Other changes have been more practical in orientation, such as the quaint open-sided buses, which shuttle tourists around a ring road to their respective hotels. Until recently, those busloads of visitors were likely to take a boat through the winding network of waterways, admire arched stone bridges, stock up on locally-woven silk, and perhaps sample a bowl or two of steaming yang rou mian (lamb noodles).

All that changed in 2013 with the launch of Wuzhen Theater Festival. The festival is housed inside a specially commissioned, twin lotus-shaped building by Taiwanese architect Kris Yao, as well as several restored “ancient theaters” throughout the town. Wowing its initially skeptical audiences, the first edition was overseen by celebrated playwright and director Stan Lai. Last year’s honorary president was none other than Tony Award-winning theatre director Peter Brook. In the same year, Wuzhen upped the ante further still with the grand opening of Mu Xin Art Museum, dedicated to the late local artist, poet, and writer. Housed inside yet another striking contemporary structure—this time by Hiroshi Okamoto and Bing Lin of OLI Architecture—it lent further credibility to Wuzhen’s cultural transformation.
Cementing Wuzhen’s identity as a town where ancient and modern comfortably coexist is “Utopia/Heterotopia,” which opened last month and remains on display through the end of June. The exhibition comprises works by dozens of international artists, curated by a team led by Feng Boyi alongside an advisory committee featuring some very big names indeed, the likes of Hou Hanru (artistic director, MAXXI, Rome), Uli Sigg (collector and M+ museum benefactor, Hong Kong) and Philip Tinari (director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing) among them.

The multi-site show’s main exhibition is housed inside North Silk Factory, a series of repurposed industrial spaces beautifully converted to showcase both an original pitched wooden ceiling and a darling courtyard at its heart. Inside are new works created especially for the exhibition, as well as previously-exhibited showstoppers by artists including Bill Viola, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, and Marina Abramović. Of the commissioned pieces, Finnbogi Pétursson’s Infra - Supra (2014) is particularly striking. Vibrations from three deeply pulsating speakers positioned above a pool of water are made visible through cleverly positioned spotlights to create wave after hypnotic wave. In a town with this much water, the installation feels particularly apt. Another site-specific work comes courtesy of Oliver Herring. Given run of North Silk Factory’s construction site last winter, performance piece Areas for Action: Wuzhen (2015) is archived in film, photography, glitter, and paint to gloriously messy effect, with bemused-looking bystanders—construction workers, cleaners, and more—underscoring the initiative’s community bent.
A short walk away and inside the town proper, seven works sit alongside traditional noodle shops and cobbled streets. Stealing the show is Florentijn Hofman’s spectacular Floating Fish (2016). Already well-known in China thanks to the blockbuster tour of his Rubber Duck, Hofman’s Wuzhen intervention is topical, bright pink, and drawing crowds. More subdued but no less striking is Ann Hamilton’s site-specific Again, Still, Yet. Housed inside one of those restored ancient theaters, the work nods to Wuzhen’s tradition of silk production and sees a weaver at her loom on the historic stage, its spools of red thread stretched taut like lasers to each and every of the venue’s seats, all to the tinkle of tiny bells as the silk worker maneuvers her apparatus.

In Wuzhen, it’s not just the caliber of artists, artworks, and curation that turns heads, but also the quality of their installation. More refreshing still is the price: tickets to the North Silk Factory exhibition cost an eminently affordable 25rmb (around US$4), while day passes to the town itself are 120rmb. In the context of private museum exhibitions in China’s more expected art hubs, which are beyond the financial means of many, it’s a steal that lends credibility to Chen’s commitment to serving the community he calls home.
Ambitious, far-reaching, and truly international, Wuzhen International Contemporary Art Exhibition adds yet another dimension to the town. Doubtless, guide books will still attach the by-now cliché “Venice of the East” moniker for all the wrong reasons—but it’s one that this picturesque locale seems set to fast grow into.

—Frances Arnold

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Why New York’s Most Important Art District Is Now the Lower East Side

Artsy Editorial

Casey Lesser

Apr 6th, 2016 2:16 am

“Chinatown definitely feels like it’s the new Lower East Side,” says the young gallerist Ellie Rines when we meet at her gallery, 56 Henry. “I feel like that’s kind of unquestionable.” The space is a tiny white cube, measuring just eight-by-eight feet, and is nestled on a quiet thoroughfare by the Manhattan Bridge dotted with dumpling and noodle shops, Chinese groceries, Protestant churches—and, especially as of late, galleries. Inside, the white cube (now featuring Hanna Liden) gives way to two antechambers—a hidden viewing room, and beyond it living quarters, where the gallerist offers me a cup of tea and some perspective on the rampant art scene that’s multiplying around us.
Rines is a part of a recent migration that has galleries gravitating to the Lower East Side and Chinatown. She opened 56 Henry in December 2015, just four months after being forced to shutter her previous microgallery 55 Gansevoort—an elevator shaft a block east of the Whitney—after Restoration Hardware bought its building. The new gallery sits on a stretch of Henry Street that also includes Chapter NY, Cuevas Tilleard, and newcomer Shrine, and is just blocks from Chinatown stalwart Reena Spaulings Fine Art and now the shiny new Foxy Production. Notable neighbors also include freshly launched programs like Erin Goldberger’s New Release, located in a former video store, and Angelo Lanza’s gallery Jeffrey Stark in the basement of the East Broadway Mall. And not a stone’s throw away are the southern bounds of the Lower East Side, where hundreds of more galleries gather.
This burgeoning Chinatown scene is a piece in the puzzle that has seen a sharp uptick over the past few years in the number of galleries downtown. In September 2015, Crain’s New York Business reported that the Lower East Side was home to some 224 galleries, a number that has steadily climbed since before 2007, when the New Museum opened on the Bowery. The real surge began in 2011. A handful of early settlers like Cuchifritos (opened 2001), Canada (opened in Lower East Side in 2002), and Reena Spaulings (opened 2003) set up shop in the neighborhood well before the museum’s opening. But many more joined in the year prior to it—Miguel Abreu (opened 2006), James Fuentes (opened 2007), and Eleven Rivington (opened 2007) among them. And further yet, established galleries such as Salon 94 and Lehmann Maupin soon swooped in to open downtown outposts.

Less than a decade later, history is repeating itself. Hardly a week goes by without murmurings that yet another gallery is opening (or reopening) on the Lower East Side or in Chinatown. The reasons vary. Real estate is a significant factor. But the sheer variety of galleries indicates that there’s more than rising rents and taxes at play. Particularly over the past two years, a broad swath of galleries—blue-chip galleries, established Chelsea dealers, European galleries, artist-run galleries, young curatorial projects, and deep-pocketed self-starters among them—have taken the plunge and moved downtown.
In 2016 alone, we’ve already seen the reopening of 11R (formerly Eleven Rivington), Metro Pictures’s new temporary space on Pitt Street, Pierogi Gallery’s Manhattan debut, and Foxy Production’s opening in Chinatown. Johannes Vogt and Derek Eller will follow suit later this spring. Danziger Gallery and CRG have moved from Chelsea to the Lower East Side, and LMAKgallery to Chinatown. New galleries Magenta Plains and Totah opened in Lower East Side. Karma has moved to Orchard Street. The list goes on.
Meanwhile, the perception and reality of art in the Lower East Side—namely, its position relative to Chelsea—has changed drastically. Galleries in the neighborhood have matured greatly, as has the art they present. And Lower East Side stereotypes (hole-in-the-wall spaces, unknown artists with half-baked ideas) have been soundly dispelled. While downtown galleries remain places for experimentation and shedding conventions, that experimentation isn’t the sole domain of young art world darlings. Mathew showed Richard Phillips last fall; Magenta Plains (which took over Launch F18’s former space) opened three weeks ago with a show of new and early works by William Wegman.
_______________________________

The rising real estate costs in Chelsea have doubtlessly contributed to galleries’ downtown migration. Many galleries that moved into Chelsea have recently reached the end of decade-long leases, leading them to face severe rent hikes and, in some cases, no option to renew. “Today, rents on the best blocks can run from $120–145 per square foot,” says Stuart Siegel, senior vice president in office brokerage at CBRE Group. Ten years ago, according to Siegel, rents were less than half that.
Where the “best blocks” used to just mean 22nd, 24th, and 25th Streets between 10th and 11th Avenue, that’s now expanded as far south as 17th Street and into the upper 20s. Siegel points to the completion of the High Line, the opening of the Whitney, and the influx of new tenants in Chelsea—from tech, fashion, and other creative industries, as well as major corporations like the luxury car dealership Tesla—as catalysts behind recent ascents in the area’s real estate costs. “Less expensive Chelsea rents can be found in higher-quality spaces in the Lower East Side,” says Siegel. So, while some galleries have been forced to move out of necessity, unable to keep up with the cost of their space, others saw the end of a lease as a chance to start anew.

Exterior view of bitforms gallery. Photo by Owen Dodd for Artsy.

For Betty Cuningham, who moved her gallery from Chelsea to the Lower East Side in 2014, real estate was the bottom line. “Economically, it was becoming extremely difficult not to work for your landlord and to be free to do what you want to do,” says Cuningham. “You really need to sell works at high prices” in order to survive. It wasn’t just the high rent that pushed her out: “Chelsea was getting way too expensive; our real estate taxes alone had gone from $1,500 the second year to $42,000 the last year.” She’s now located on Rivington Street and recently took over the end of the lease for the space next door (it was formerly Eleven Rivington). She says she’s quickly come to prefer the Lower East Side.
Steven Sacks, owner of bitforms gallery, faced a similar situation in 2014 when the end of his lease on 20th Street was approaching. “We were in Chelsea for 13 years, so we were there when things weren’t as developed,” Sacks tells me. “It was a bit more of a warehouse-y kind of environment and didn’t have all of the condos and the High Line and all of hoopla that’s there today. It was a nice place for galleries to gather and have reasonably priced rent.” But that changed: “It became a pretty major destination for the arts in New York City.” Two years before his lease ran out, Sacks jumped at the opportunity to move his gallery to Allen Street. “I decided to just be proactive and see what else was out there, I didn’t feel comfortable paying super high rents in Chelsea and to be honest I just wanted to get out of that scene; it wasn’t really feeling welcoming anymore.”
_______________________________

A decade ago, the New York art world might have looked to Brooklyn for the next frontier for galleries. Instead, a rapid cycle of gentrification has dampened the potential for a thriving community of commercial galleries in Williamsburg. It’s this very issue that prompted gallerists Joe Amrhein and Susan Swenson of the neighborhood staple Pierogi Gallery—located on North Ninth Street since opening in 1994—to relocate across the East River to Suffolk Street. “Williamsburg has had a wonderful history of showing art and of artists living there, but a lot of it has dissipated because of gentrification,” says Amrhein. “A lot have moved to Bushwick, Ridgewood, Red Hook, and other parts of Brooklyn and Queens. And as people move around, it’s hard to get a lot of attention now.” They were drawn to the concentration of galleries in the Lower East Side, and the crucial mass of critics and collectors that consistently descend on the neighborhood’s openings. “The quality of the galleries here and their willingness to take chances—we want to be a part of that,” he adds.
This existing community of galleries is a consistently cited catalyst for many of the galleries who have moved to the Lower East Side. Organizations like the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), which is located on Chrystie Street, as well as the neighborhood’s tightly knit streets and numerous art-world residents, have fostered a sense of welcome that’s often missing from other, more post-industrial gallery-concentrated neighborhoods. As the community of galleries downtown has strengthened, so too has the art-going audience there—including collectors. And a small network of determined gallerists has now grown and been added to in order to become a life force that fosters profitability.

This rising tide argument, that better galleries foster the growth of other better galleries downtown, was a common thread across my conversations over the past two months. “The Lower East Side has shifted so much in the past two years,” says Rines back at 56 Henry. “Look at something like Eleven Rivington,” Augusto Arbizo and John Van Doren’s gallery on Chrystie Street, rebranded and reopened as 11R this past January. “That space is so pristine and beautiful, it’s like a Chelsea gallery.” Rines suggests that success stories like this one are inspiring other galleries to get in on the action. “I think a lot of it is because of the success of James Fuentes, Eleven Rivington, and Rachel Uffner—that they want to stay where they are, and they’re able to open up these really beautiful spaces,” says Rines. “Anything goes now. The Lower East Side doesn’t have to be ghetto and dingy anymore.” (It can also still be dingy when it wants to be, she jokes.)
While Rines looks to galleries like James Fuentes, Fuentes himself points to an earlier point in the Lower East Side’s development as the impetus for his own space. Fuentes, who grew up in the neighborhood, recalls being excited by the possibility that the neighborhood had for galleries back in 2003 or 2004. He lived across from Maccarone on Canal Street and nearby Canada on Chrystie. And he watched as Orchard Gallery, a cooperative run by 12 individuals including artists Andrea Fraser and R.H. Quaytman, opened on Orchard Street. “At that moment I felt like there was really so much potential for the development of a great community of galleries down here,” he recalls.
Fuentes opened a two-story space on St. James Place in Chinatown in 2007, which he initially lived in but vacated to expand the exhibition space. Three and a half years later, he moved to his current location at 55 Delancey Street, which was the only gallery on the street at the time. In late 2014 Fuentes expanded the gallery, and last year he opened Allen & Eldridge, a small project space in the basement. All the while he’s developed a roster of artists ranging from revered photographer Jonas Mekas to internet darling Amalia Ulman. “I’ve started to reinvest in my gallery recently,” says the gallerist of his recent expansion, which he says itself is motivated by a responsibility to continue to see the neighborhood continue to thrive. “Gentrification is so rampant in this neighborhood, I felt this desire to carve out a space for contemporary art while we still could,” he explains. “Galleries are getting priced out of Chelsea, but in a few short years we’ll probably be priced out here. Rather than move out, I decided to carve out a real position here.”
RJ Supa, who opened Louis B. James with David Fierman on Orchard Street in 2011, was immediately drawn to the neighborhood. “I was friends with people down here; it’s a community,” says Supa. “I didn’t really even consider Chelsea, just because it felt like I would probably get lost in the shuffle, being a smaller gallery with a roster of emerging artists.” And over the course of the past five years he’s seen remarkable growth. “I remember when we were first opening and meeting collectors and I was telling them where I was and I had this one collector say ‘I didn’t know there was anything east of Bowery,’” he recalls.

A similar sense of community led Foxy Production co-founders Michael Gillespie and John Thomson to leave a ground-floor space on Chelsea’s 27th Street, where they had been since 2003, for a second-floor space in Chinatown, thus risking a loss of foot traffic. But the critical mass of like-minded peers was also a huge draw: “The galleries that are in Chinatown, like Chapter NY or Reena Spaulings, they have a certain character and I think people will be interested in seeing that character expand,” Thomson says. “Where we are is close to Lower East Side—there are hundreds of galleries there.”
Isaac Lyles opened Lyles & King with his wife Alexandra King-Lyles on Forsyth Street last May after debuting at NADA New York (where they showed up-and-coming artists MacGregor Harp and Chris Hood). “It’s a community that’s more accepting of younger, emerging artists,” Lyles tells me over the phone. “This is where my family is—this is my art family. The galleries here are part of the backbone of the NADA community; these are the people that are my mentors and peers.” Lyles & King is a prime example of a new gallery that is built around a program of artists on the rise—in addition to Hood, Lyles’s budding roster includes Phillip Birch and Davina Semo. “As much as things still continue to potentially move around, to the Upper East Side and Harlem, for example, the Lower East Side is still a community of people doing interesting and dynamic programming and going to bat for emerging artists that they believe in.”
Because of the community’s focus on emerging artists, one might assume that the collectors frequenting the Lower East Side differ from those visiting the Upper East Side and Chelsea. “After opening the space, I think we thought that there would be two distinct audiences,” says Serra Pradhan of Marianne Boesky’s Clinton Street outpost, Boesky East. “But we learned that it’s really a lot of the same people, that people are going to Chelsea on Saturday and Lower East Side on Sunday.” Nathalie Karg, who moved her gallery from Great Jones Street to the fourth floor of 291 Grand Street in March of last year, echos that the Lower East Side custom of staying open on Sunday “is a major benefit” to galleries in the area. “Collectors often say they make a point to come on Sunday,” spending their Saturday afternoons in Chelsea and uptown, says Karg.
The neighborhood’s multiplicity as both a favored hangout and a gallery epicenter does gives it a wider reach than more art-specific neighborhoods like Chelsea, however. Case in point is Richard Taittinger, who opened his eponymous space on Ludlow Street in March 2015. When I visit Taittinger produces his iPhone, which is fixed on an image from Miley Cyrus’s Instagram account, picturing the artwork we’re standing next to—a sculpture of a tongue made from pink acrylic fingernails by South African artist Frances Goodman. He laughs as he mentions that he’d like the pop star to purchase the piece, but points seriously to the hundreds of thousands of likes the image garnered.
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For many galleries who have moved or expanded to the Lower East Side—whether those with established programs like Marianne Boesky and James Cohan or others still emerging—a downtown space is an opportunity to provide their artists a new context to be inspired by. “We wanted to try something different and look for a space that could give our artists a new challenge,” says Foxy Production’s Thomson of their move from Chelsea. Former watering holes, tenements, and offbeat shops have left galleries with a wealth of non-traditional spaces for showing contemporary art: Boesky’s space used to be a beauty supply shop; Cohan’s corner lot was a fish market; Taittinger’s gallery was a music venue called the Living Room.

Boesky East. Photo by Owen Dodd for Artsy.

When I visit Jesse Greenberg at 247365, the two-floor Stanton Street gallery he runs with fellow artist MacGregor Harp, he’s quick to point out the advantages of spaces downtown. “Having a more intimate and weirder, out of the way space is kind of what excites artists,” says Greenberg. “Going to Chelsea is like going to a big-box store or something—though not all of them. The amount of artist-run spaces and young curatorial endeavors downtown is energizing.”
Greenberg speaks from experience. “I show with Derek Eller and he’s working on his space on Broome Street now,” says the artist/gallerist. (Eller rented a former auto-body shop at 300 Broome Street, where he anticipates opening in May of this year.) “I’m excited as an artist to be showing there because I feel more connected to what’s happening around here.” Greenberg began 247365 with Harp in Brooklyn in 2012, alongside Primetime and Know More Games in Carroll Gardens (dubbed the Donut District due to the nearby Dunkin Donuts). They developed a following there but jumped at the opportunity to open a space in the Lower East Side—a basement on Eldridge Street that formerly housed Eli Ping’s gallery. Greenberg explains, “When Eli Ping decided to move, we were at a place where things were going well in Brooklyn, and the gallery was beginning to support itself. So we said, ‘Well, we could either start paying ourselves or we can get another space.’ It sounded fun and a little crazy, so we just did it.” They moved again in spring of 2015, to the current space, where they now turn out two new shows every five weeks—always with openings that spill out onto the sidewalk—and just announced their first artist roster, including Brian Belott, Lizzie Fitch, and Lukas Geronimas, among others.
For established and blue-chip galleries, downtown spaces serve as complements to their existing locations. “We made a conscious decision not to recreate a Chelsea-like space,” says Pradhan of Boesky East—which opened in May 2014 and maintains the surrounding neighborhood’s aesthetic with a simple aluminum storefront and the building’s original mosaic detail on the facade. “Boesky East was more focused on having things be a little more spontaneous in feel, and a place where you can experiment,” she explains. It’s become a place to give gallery artists their first solo shows, or to lend them a setting that is less daunting to fill and better suited to their work than the more traditional, lofty setting of the Chelsea gallery.
Aside from inspiration, smaller spaces can also be advantageous for artists and gallerists both, given the current demands placed on them by the art market. Most established and mid-career artists constantly manage relationships with multiple galleries worldwide, all attempting to schedule shows amid a seemingly never-ending list of art fairs for which all of those galleries want work to show. So the less-demanding, more experimentation-friendly spaces offered downtown are a blessing. And for galleries, being able to keep more artists in their stable happy is no small thing, too.

“We’ve been in the same space for a number of years and one of the things artists really respond to is the space you have,” says David Norr, a senior director at James Cohan, whose main gallery remains on 26th Street. Norr works out of their corner Lower East Side space at 291 Grand Street, which he says attracted the gallery because of its “great proportions and great natural light.” They opened last November with a show of psychedelic drawings by Robert Smithson, effectively doubling the opportunity for their artists to have exhibitions in New York. The building has become a major gallery hub, now housing 47 Canal, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, and Nathalie Karg above Cohan. All moved in since summer 2014.
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Of course, with growth inevitably comes questions of if and when it will all end. “I thought a few years ago that the Lower East Side had sort of peaked,” says James Fuentes. “But actually, at this point, I don’t think it has quite yet.” Rents have risen dramatically in the neighborhood, too, “and there’s often speculation about where could be next,” says the gallerist, adding that this is an inevitable cycle that the New York City art world goes through every 5 or 10 years. “Harlem is a viable place to relocate or open a gallery.” (Gavin Brown and Elizabeth Dee are headed there.)
But, regardless of how long this expansion will continue, what’s certain is that the New York art paradigm has irrevocably shifted: “It used to be peripheral to Chelsea, but now, for a true art lover, coming to Lower East Side to visit galleries is mandatory,” says Fuentes. “It’s on a totally equal playing field, just generally on a smaller scale.”
So as Lower East Side galleries move onward and upward, they may have to move out. But for now, we’re left with the largest, highest-quality, and most vibrant downtown art community the city has ever seen—and we should take advantage while we can.

—Casey Lesser