Initially, Garth Greenan didn’t realize that the lease for his current space on West 20th Street in Chelsea would expire on the eve of his eponymous gallery’s 15th anniversary. But once he did, he took it as a sign to start a new chapter for the business.
In September, Garth Greenan Gallery will relocate to SoHo and open in two spaces across the street from each other, at 10 Greene Street and 25 Greene Street. The gallery’s solo exhibition for Esteban Cabeza de Baca, which closed on February 27, was its last in Chelsea.
Both forthcoming galleries are located in landmarked, cast-iron buildings and their interiors will be retrofitted by Stuart Basseches Architect in collaboration with Konstantinos Spiropoulos. With a total of 3,575 square feet across the two sites, including viewing rooms and on-site storage, the gallery will nearly triple its footprint.
“I was walking to work one day in Chelsea, and I thought about how long I’d worked on this one block,” Greenan told ARTnews in a phone interview. “I just realized that I had options of [other] places I could be once the lease expired, and that I didn’t have to be in Chelsea in order to be a successful art dealer. I used to think there were very specific things one needed to do in order to be taken seriously as a gallerist in New York. That’s still sort of true, but I think those rules have changed a lot.”
Over the past 15 years, Greenan has built a program that focuses on the “rescue reclamation, or reframing of artists who are historically significant,” as he put it. Among these are artists whose careers were ignored for decades and have since been recognized not only as significant but that have moved from the margins of the art world to the center. They include Howardena Pindell, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Rosalyn Drexler, Gladys Nilsson, and Emmi Whitehorse, who last week announced a co-representation deal with White Cube.
“Apropos of this move, I was thinking about 15 years in the sense of historicizing the gallery. I never thought that we were doing anything that was that significant,” he said. “I was just getting these artists ready for the world of commerce, and I proved that that was a viable business model. Now everybody’s copied it.”
The exterior of 10 Greene Street, the second space to which Garth Greenan Gallery will relocate.
Courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery
Located just north of Canal Street, the new gallery spaces are located on the other side of the major thoroughfare from Tribeca, which has once again become one of the city’s main gallery neighborhoods over the past decade. Greenan said he didn’t want to be directly in the middle of Tribeca, “but I’m fine being Tribeca adjacent,” he said.
That preference to be somewhat of a destination—albeit a short one, for those who might in the area going from gallery to gallery—stems from the gallery’s roots, when it was initially located on the 10th floor of the 529 Arts Building, also on West 20th Street. “I thought that was a problem, and being on the ground floor of 545 has certainly served us very well,” Greenan said, but “I’m ready to do our own thing, especially now that we have more resources.”
The two inaugural exhibitions this fall are solos for Rosalyn Drexler and Cannupa Hanska Luger. Greenan said he sees this as a way to show just how expansive the gallery’s program is. “Having two spaces, I’ll be able to have artists in dialog with each other, and be able to do larger, more ambitious exhibitions,” he said, adding that a future pairing might be Nicholas Krushenick and Melissa Cody, as a way to think about differing histories of abstraction.
Greenan said the move for the gallery is a way to think of its future, for at least the next 15 years, especially in a moment when the art market is beginning to recover and stabilize. “I’m not saying the old model is old in the sense that it is bad. It just needs to be retooled, and I think a smart gallerist is doing what they can to retool,” he said. “I think most relevant thing that we do is keep it interesting.”
