Over the course of 2024, New York City’s gallery infrastructure continued to feel the tectonic shifts that began in 2023. Last year, all eyes were on Tribeca, as rosy-eyed art dealers in Chelsea moved to either expand into the chic downtown neighborhood, or trade their spaces altogether for the greener grasses (and cobblestone streets) of lower Manhattan.
This year, to some, has seemed more dour than last. Chinatown and the Lower East Side, which have typically served as petri dishs for cultivating exciting new artists and project spaces, suffered two major losses this year when Simone Subal Gallery and Helena Anrather both decided to permanently close their doors. Two months after closing her gallery, Subal announced that she was joining Paula Cooper, where she worked as an intern in 1999 and as a staff member from 2000 to 2003.
Subal’s decision to accept a senior director role at Paula Cooper’s outfit echoed JTT founder Jasmin Tsou’s decision to close up shop last year and join the blue-chip world as a director at Lisson Gallery and Tribeca’s David Lewis decision in September to join mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth as a senior director.
“It’s been a really difficult market year,” Anton Svyatsky, founder of the contemporary art gallery Management, told me over the phone. “The cost of doing business is as high as it has ever been.” According to Svyatsky, one reason galleries are suffering is a lack of serious patronage.
That absense of patronage was the subject of an op-ed by Miami-based art dealer Nina Johnson who, in December, just before Art Basel Miami Beach, wrote that “over the past year or so, as colleagues have shuttered their doors, I have come to realize that, with the growth of the art market, we have gained buyers but lost patrons.”
“The downtown scene definitely contracted,” Svyatsky also told me. “Fewer and fewer people are willing to take the financial risk of opening a curatorial space. At this point, if you wanted to open a space, you’d need patronage. On the bright side, the general consensus is that if you were able to survive this year, which was an absolute commercial blood bath, you’ll be fine for the time being.”
While the contraction is clear—between this year and last the downtown scene also lost Foxy Production, Queer Thoughts, Deli, and Jack Hanley Gallery—art dealer Alexander Meurice of the gallery Foreign and Domestic said that “the closure of a few galleries doesn’t feel like an existential problem in the Lower East Side because the art scene in the neighborhood is about more than galleries. It so much more broad.” There are studios, pop-up spaces where a show will be up for only a week or a few days, literary spaces like Sovereign House, as well as photography and fashion studios, all of which, Meurice said, contributes to the Lower East Side’s heterogeneous art scene.
“Galleries closing is not a downtown story,” Meurice said, “it’s a universal story.”
He’s not wrong. In June, Mitchell-Innes & Nash closed its Chelsea space to transition away from a traditional gallery business toward “a project-based advisory space” model. Cheim & Read closed late last year after 26-years in the business, and Marlborough Gallery announced in April that it was winding down operations after 80 years.
“There’s a plateau, and for lot of galleries reaching that plateau come to the realization that it’s impossible to get any farther without some big money behind you,” said art dealer David Fierman, whose gallery is along the bustling Chinatown gallery destination Henry Street. “And with the money dropping out of the market to a degree, that makes it hard for smaller or more emerging spaces to compete.”
Still, according to Fierman, the downtown scene, particular in the Lower East Side is thriving. Rents are reasonable and exciting curatorial spaces are able to operate on a shoestring budget and still be taken seriously by the greater art world. “This fall in particular the foot traffic in the neighborhood and along the Henry Street corridor is busy,” he said.
New York Magazine art critic and polarizing art world sage Jerry Saltz has been taking an interest in the downtown scene on Instagram and the Metropolitan Museum of Art director Max Hollein is a regular visitor to the neighborhood.
“Sometimes galleries don’t last that long and they close for a variety of reasons,” Fierman said. “More importantly, there are always new people who want to start things. Given the state of the world, I think people are embracing the chaos energy. It’s the only way to ride the wave that we’ve been given.”
2025: Bring on the chaos.
