Author: aryanahmad313@gmail.com
One November night in 1974, a boisterous crowd spilled out onto 57th Street in Manhattan as a new gallery opened in what was then the center of the art establishment and its elite power brokers. Linda Goode Bryant, a 25-year-old single mother fueled by a vision and some debt, opened the space to support an emerging group of Black conceptual artists whose work strayed from the representational mode celebrated in Harlem the city’s Black art Mecca while going unrecognized by New York’s white art world. At the gallery known as Just Above Midtown, they found a home. The gallery is…
The Jack Hanley Gallery is set to close in New York’s TriBeCa neighborhood after thirty seven years in operation reports. The gallery was established in Austin, Texas, in 1987 as Trans Avant Garde Gallery; founding dealer Jack Hanley moved the business to San Francisco in 1990, changing its name to the current one. Hanley for a short time in the 2000s ran a second space in Los Angeles but closed both California galleries in 2008 and set up shop in New York. From its inception, Jack Hanley Gallery sought to elevate little known artists, in the 1990s giving future heavy hitters such…
Lately, art fans in the three biggest cities in the US (and no doubt elsewhere) have found themselves surrounded by ceramics. At museums, galleries, and fairs, artists working in this ancient medium are showing work ranging from classic forms like cups and vases to figurative and abstract sculpture. Allow us to start with a litany of such shows, in no particular order. In New York, Kathy Butterly’s diminutive pieces sold out at James Cohan at $45,000 each. Nicole Cherubini’s show at Friedman Benda nearly sold out at prices up to $65,000. Ruby Neri’s work was on view uptown at Salon 94,…
An Artemisia Gentileschi painting entered the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., marking the first work by the artist to join the museum’s holdings. The painting, titled Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy (ca. 1625), was thought to be lost until it resurfaced in 2011 in a French private collection. In 2014, it headed to auction at Sotheby’s, where it sold for $1.1 million, at the time notching a new auction record for Gentileschi. In the 12 year long interval between that Sotheby’s auction and the present, Gentileschi has achieved mainstream recognition especially following the #MeToo movement of the late 2010s, when her paintings of…
San Francisco’s Rena Bransten Gallery, known for championing BIPOC and female artists since 1975, will close on November 22, along with its current Oliver Lee Jackson exhibition. The operation will shift its focus to remote programming and collaborative exhibitions at various venues. “The economics of running a brick and mortar gallery once supported by a steady flow of sales, institutional partnerships, and walk-in engagement has shifted, asking us to consider new models,” wrote gallery owners Rena and Trish Bransten in a press release. “As John Waters observed when told we were closing our space, ‘It is the end of an era.’”…
New York’s Deli Gallery, known for elevating cutting edge work by emerging artists, will close on September 28, according to a post on its Instagram account. Founded in Long Island City, Queens, in 2016 by Max Marshall, the operation moved to Brooklyn in 2018 before landing in its current TriBeCa home in 2021. The gallery had launched a Mexico City outpost in 2022. “It has been a privilege and an unbelievable gift to be able to realize so many incredible exhibitions and share our unique vision and voice with all of you,” wrote Marshall in the post. “The gallery was founded on a…
Clearing gallery, which launched in New York in 2011 and opened an outpost in Los Angeles in 2020, has announced its closure in both cities. The gallery was known for its unpretentious atmosphere and for bringing attention to cutting edge artists in the early stages of their careers, including Harold Ancart, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Huma Bhabha, Meriem Bennani, and Lili Reynaud-Dewar. News of its closure comes hot on the heels of announcements that New York galleries Venus Over Manhattan and Kasmin were shuttering, with Kasmin revealing its closure only two days prior. Clearing will mount no further exhibitions, with a Coco Young show that closed…
After more than six years, a mystery woman captured in a portrait that was acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in 2020 has been identified, Artnet reports. The painting, which the museum acquired at auction at Sotheby’s, was signed J. Schul and dates back to the eighteenth century. It depicts a young Black woman, bedecked with pearls and holding an orange tree blossom. Via painstaking research by fashion historians, museum experts and the like, the AGO determined that the painting was by Jeremias Schultz, who painted it in 1775; the subject is Eleonora Susette, an enslaved mixed-race woman from Guyana her last name is still unknown. As…