Marc Straus Gallery announced Tuesday that Graham Wilson, the founder of Tribeca’s Swivel Gallery, has joined the gallery as a partner and senior director.
As part of the move, Swivel will close its Tribeca space and its artists will move over to Straus, which has locations in Tribeca and the Lower East Side. The latter, located at 299 Grand Street, will host a group exhibition curated by Wilson and showcasing Swivel’s artists, set to open March 19.
“The art world is evolving quickly, with rising costs and a growing need for collaboration reshaping gallery operations in New York City,” the gallery said in a press statement. “With our four-story Lower East Side gallery, our Tribeca space, and a talented team, joining forces with Graham allows us to merge our programs, strengthen our support for artists, and create more opportunities for creative growth.”
In a phone call with ARTnews, Wilson similarly described the move as an effort to better support Swivel’s artists with more gallery infrastructure, as their careers have grown.
“It’s about having the right amount of staff and resources, and having those resources even in a down market,” Wilson said. Straus has “a handful of high-stature artists and we bring a new generation of artists that are on that horizon. It’s a good mix [for the galleries] and it’s a good mix for the artists to be in that conversation.”
Swivel artists like Amy Bravo and Kiah Celeste, who will respectively appear in group exhibitions this year at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem, have gained traction in recent years. Straus shows the Vienna Actionist Hermann Nitsch, sculptor Rona Pondick, Transavanguardia painter Sandro Chia, and Renée Stout, among others.
Wilson added that he expects consolidation moves between like-minded galleries to become more common as collectors and audiences seek “less saturation.” Indeed, last September, dealers Bridget Donahue and Hannah Hoffman announced that they would merge their eponymous galleries into one enterprise. And, just last week, Lisbon’s Galerie Madragoa and Warsaw’s Galeria Dawid Radziszewski announced that they were launching a joint gallery in Milan, Consonni Radziszewski.
While Wilson is no stranger to collaboration—Swivel has often worked with galleries in Mexico City and elsewhere—he said that he’s looking forward to not being the “only voice in the room.”
“As an emerging gallerist it’s difficult because you have so little feedback on what you are doing,” he said. “The only feedback you get is congratulations. Having a think tank is going to be very beneficial.”
Wilson, a former artist, launched Swivel in 2021 in Bed-Stuy. In 2023, the gallery moved to a 5,000-square-foot Bushwick warehouse in 2023, taking over the space of now-defunct gallery Clearing. Then in late 2024, the gallery made the move to Manhattan, a 2,000-square-foot space near Hudson Square. Swivel has been a fixture on the fair circuit, doing as many as 10 in a year, often showing at Untitled, NADA, and the Armory Show.
