Tips for the first-time, non-deep-pocketed art buyer?
Go to benefit auctions. Pay the pricey ticket for, say, the White Columns benefit, and you can get amazing work for not too much, even when you factor in the price of admission. Most of the art I have from my first years of collecting has come from auctions: I have a Margaret Lee photograph, a Rebecca Morris large drawing, a Dike Blair piece … a lot.
How long have you had your gallery?
I opened in September of 2008, literally like the day after Lehman Brothers collapsed.
Whoa.
It was a really terrifying, traumatic time. People thought that the world was ending, basically. I had a friend who was a dentist out in L.A., and for a second, I thought, Okay, if this gallery doesn’t work out, maybe I can be a dentist. It was kind of a joke, but also not. I thought, you know, I’m nerdy enough, I could get into teeth.
Lightning Round:
Neighborhood: Carroll Gardens.
Rent or own? Rent.
Local eatery: Court Street Grocers. “For a good sandwich.”
Go-to drink: An old-fashioned.
Children: One. “I have a 2-year-old named Henry. He’s a really good guy.”
Artwork you’d most like to steal: Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.
Favorite museum: “I’m a Whitney and MoMA girl.”
First apartment: On 10th and University. “I shared a room with a friend in my cousin’s apartment. It lasted eight months.”
*This article appears in the June 16, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.