The art world is an interdependent system of artists, collectors, galleries, museums, government and the press. Like the engine in your car, when one piston goes out, the whole thing sputters.
Galleries, for instance, are an essential link between artists and their market. Fulcrums for artists, they have their own hierarchy, from those that serve as the entry point for inexperienced artists to those that actively shape an artist’s career, cultivating collectors and curators, putting out catalogs and finding exhibition opportunities in galleries elsewhere or in arts centers and museums
Galleries perform a civic as well as a commercial function. Free and open to all, they play their part in ensuring that art of all kinds by artists at different stages of their careers is a presence in the community. They are a place to enjoy and learn about all kinds of art.
Therefore, when Nancy Solomon and Marilyn Kiang, two longtime Atlanta dealers who have set a standard for showing challenging, relevant work and who represent some of Atlanta’s important artists, announce their intention to close their galleries, attention must be paid.
The closings will diminish the ranks of senior dealers here. Because a dealer’s reputation and credibility are major factors in promoting an artist’s works and in bringing high-caliber artists to Atlanta, it’s a loss that affects us all — artists who want their help and audiences that benefit from their exhibitions.
“I know and respect both of those women’s eyes,” says Rebecca Dimling Cochran, curator of the Wieland Collection at the WareHOUSE and a regular contributor to this site. “When they suggest that I look at an artist, I always know that the work will be of high quality. They are articulate in describing the content and construction of the work, and their passion for their artists is palpable. I will really miss learning from their exhibition programs.”
Although both dealers are planning Atlanta projects, they’ve decided they don’t need or want a permanent space with its attendant overhead and responsibilities.
“Times change,” says Solomon, who will close Solomon Projects when its current exhibition, “Mike Wsol: Limited Vision,” ends its run Friday, November 26 (Solomon with Wsol’s sculptures is at left). “I’ve been in this space for 18 years. I’m ready to move on to work on new ideas that have been percolating the last few years and explore life outside of the white box,” she says.
Solomon recently accepted the position of artistic curator for the three-year-old Westobou Festival in Augusta, for which she will curate arts and film projects and work on marketing strategies for festival sponsorship. Among other plans, Solomon also will publish “Small Problems in Living” (Charta), a coffee-table book of Atlanta artist Sarah Hobbs’ photographs, in March 2012.
Kiang will close her eponymous gallery when her lease expires at the end of March 2012. She will end a 20-year run with a solo exhibition of Atlanta artist Ben Steele, followed by a group show of contemporary Chinese photography — a fitting finale for the dealer who uniquely brought Chinese contemporary art to Atlanta before it hit mainstream consciousness.
Kiang says the stress of living part time in China, where her husband teaches, is a factor in her decision, as is the international character of her clientele. “The Internet is a game-changer,” she explains.
Both, however, cited the difficulty of working in Atlanta as a tipping point. They have simply run out of patience with the art scene here.
“I’ve had fantastic support from a few people, but Atlanta is very provincial,” says Kiang (at right, standing in front of a painting by Zhang Dali). She describes the local art community as risk-averse, conservative and too accepting of mediocrity. She is not alone in feeling that Atlanta is generally indifferent to art.
“I see hope in the next generation, but I’m not willing to wait,” Kiang says. “It’s time to pass the torch to someone else to fight the Battle of Atlanta.”
Solomon is more pessimistic. “I don’t know if commercial galleries have a role to play in second-tier cities like Atlanta,” she says. “[The late] Louisa McIntosh, my mentor, warned me 18 years ago. I thought it would change. But it hasn’t.”
The system, Solomon says, is stacked against galleries in cities that are not the art centers. New York’s nexus of artists, powerful dealers, major museums and general excitement lures collectors and museums to make their acquisitions there, even when home-town galleries carry the same artists.
A case in point: Alan Avery was fit to be tied when the High Museum inaugurated its Print Fair in May by inviting dealers from all over the country, but not its home town. Prints by the contemporary names the High touted were stored in Avery’s own flat files up the street. He took his complaint to High Museum Director Michael Shapiro. “I told him that the museum was perpetuating the idea that New York is the only place for good artwork,” Avery says.
Also endemic to second-tier cities is automatic doubt about the quality of local artists. The gallerists say that Atlanta buyers support young artists but require a New York imprimatur when considering mature ones whose work commands higher prices.
“There’s nothing wrong with being a second-tier city; second tier is damn good,” Kiang says. “There are so many good artists here who should be supported. We have a lot of second-tier artists but not enough second-tier collectors.”
It’s no wonder, then, that aspiring artists want representation by New York galleries. Just as understandable is the frustration of local dealers who do the hard groundwork and then don’t get credit or a financial reward when artists reach a certain point in their careers. There’s little incentive to keep a physical space, Kiang says, when exhibitions are poorly attended and her Internet clients are so eager.
Galleries everywhere also face a challenge in the growing primacy of “event culture.” The ubiquitous art fairs are a double-edged sword. On one hand, participating galleries can expand their audience (though success there is hardly assured). On the other, collectors wait to purchase at the fairs, which offer not only one-stop shopping from an array of galleries but also the frisson of mixing with celebrities, artists and other collectors.
Clearly, buying art is as much about the experience as what one takes home. That’s why the uptick in other kinds of temporary events concerns dealers, who fear that the appeal of communal experience and spectacle suck up attention and press (they have a point there) and overshadow the day-in, day-out presence of gallery or museum exhibits.
Of course, a bad economy exacerbates all of these problems.
Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and a former gallerist, can commiserate. “Running a gallery is exhausting financially and psychologically,” he says.
And a contemporary gallery more so: “Contemporary art is an acquired taste. It’s as much about not knowing as knowing. You have to create the interest and feed it consistently. That’s why gallery exhibitions are incredibly important to the health of the scene.”
Collectors should play a more active role in Atlanta’s art ecology by patronizing galleries and learning about their community’s artists. But the “Battle of Atlanta” is everybody’s battle. “We all need to do a much better job of explaining the excellence we do, in engaging people and showing them the possibilities,” says Horodner, who nevertheless maintains that he is more optimistic about the art community now than ever before. “Everybody needs to up their game.”
That goes for museums, artists and the galleries themselves, which at times are limited by passivity and lack of imagination in finding ways to engage collectors and build new audiences. A dramatic example of outside-the-white-cube thinking is Jennifer Schwartz’s “Crusade for Collecting” (at left), a cross-country tour in which she’ll sell photographs by the emerging artists she represents out of a van. For the online generation, the young Atlanta gallery owner has “The Ten,” a website offering a curated selection of 10 signed, limited-edition prints on the 10th of each month for $250 apiece.
“We’re shooting ourselves in the foot if we don’t make art fun, exciting and accessible,” Schwartz says.
Let’s face it. Our city is never going to be New York. New developments such as the growing popularity of online buying and communal artistic experiences might seem to render the white cube an economic folly. Indeed, one might argue that the Battle of Atlanta is more like the Hundred Years’ War.
But despite it all, Atlantans continue to join the fray, even if — like James McConnell and Mark Basehore of Beep Beep Gallery and MINT founder Erica Jamison — they have to hold down full-time jobs to do so. Dealers grouse and worry, but they love their artists, their galleries and the physical experience with art that occurs within them.
As Kiang says, “It takes balls, passion and insanity to do this.” Fortunately for Atlanta’s art ecology, those traits appear to be renewable resources.
COMMENTS
This is a really good article about what is in the future for Atlanta’s arts and galleries. I opened my studio gallery a couple months ago and is not easy to keep it alive. It take too much energy , time of my creativity, and of course lot of money , but the passion and insanity still my best weapon…and a little luck.
Marilyn Kiang says, “It takes balls, passion and insanity to do this.” It is also ballsy for artists to think that they can give up their day jobs — in most cases. Unfortunately, the loss of two established galleries will make it even less likely.
So how did Dali do it?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerry-chautin/salvador-dali-virtuoso-ar_b_671692.html
Jerry Chautin
This is an addendum to my story:
It’s worth noting that, as difficult as operating a gallery might be, especially in this economy, there are number of gallerists who have figured out a way forward and are actually thriving. To cite one example, Jackson Fine Art seems to have found a successful model that combines active personal customer service, out-of-town sales and secondary-market connections. Though gallery exhibitions aren’t the main driver, director Anna Walker-Skillman believes in the physical space and the importance of being there as fundamental to her business.
Marilyn,
It’s vey sad.
Thank you for being the only one in this state (region?) to regularly show great Asian contemporary art! Real courage for an art dealer in a “second tier” city is to show great work from other countries. You did that in a big way and should be super proud of yourself. Who else would have brought us the work of Chi Peng and Sze Tsung Leong. Nobody. No one will fill that gap. It has nothing to so with NYC. It has to do with the same ole same ole lazy proventialism in Atlanta where collectors collect the same people over and over and over again, almost like folow the leader. Let’s hope we can continue to learn about the rest of the world through art. It is our only chance. Thank you for often also showing the best cutting edge photography, eventhough you were never a photo gallery by design.
NYC is not an adjective!
Zoe, congrats on your show. Being reviewed in ATL has nothing to do with gender. In fact, I find Atlanta to be very fair to women artists. I have been reviewed in Atlanta since I first showed here as have many other women artists. I can’t tell you why you haven’t been reviewed, that is for the critics to respond.
I wish once and for all everybody would let go of the NYC model. NYC is NYC. We aren’t. We are something entirely different. It is beyond ridiculous to compare these two cities— two entirely different art ecosystems. In NYC there is an elaborate pecking order as to where you show/who represents you and what this means to an ‘art career’. It’s kind of a game…but to many people who don’t know this, just having that NYC label attached to your name is instant cache…. my point— its great if you show elsewhere, its great if you have a show in NYC. But to those that collect and go shopping in NYC ( I don’t know if they read this page) just because it says ‘shown in nyc’ doesn’t mean you are buying better art, what you are doing is buying at the big art mall. Collectors are special people. And I respect those that have an eye and listen to themselves and want something in their life that enhances it and that they need to live with. In my opinion, collecting is about engagement and passion. But then, I am an artist, and I see art in a different way.
Well said. But, how about us artist we have made NYC? I have exhibited in two New York Galleries. Currently, I am represented by Foley Gallery in Chelsea. I am one of seven artist chosen for Foley Gallery’s 7th anniversary exhibition, “Looking Forward,” November 10 – December 23. ONLY two paintings from my series of “Rhythm Rhythm,” (spanning from 2001-2011) paintings have ever been sold in Atlanta. And those paintings were sold by the collector viewing the paintings in NYC and CA Galleries and buying my working not knowing they were from an Atlanta Artist.
And to the Atlanta Art Critics, during my 12 year career in Atlanta (ten of those at Fay Gold) I have never ONE time had a review written about my work. So much for support from the local art community, critics and collectors. (can’t help but, wonder… would it have been different if I had been a male artist from Atlanta?) Zoe
http://www.foleygallery.com
I stand corrected, Mairly Kiang also sold 10 photos to High.
On the positive side the High is engaging people to directly support collicing for the museum with Collectors evening. Really part of the mission is for people to interact with the 7 curators, see what they are intested in, hopefully stay connected.
and, one person doesn’t make a city, but this conversation made me think how much atlanta misses ben apfelbaum.
Good point, also, about the art fairs. They play a useful role; it’s a way to get an overview of what’s out there, and which galleries you might want to get to know better. (And seeing work at a fair is generally preferable to the online experience.) But “art overload” can get to you after a while at these fairs. Fairs, and crowded gallery openings, may offer that “event culture”, but for anyone really interested in starting or ramping up their collecting, I recommend going to visit a gallery on a quiet afternoon (call ahead maybe?). Talk to the gallery owner about the current show, but also about other artists they represent. Some of my best experiences have come from getting a look at “the stuff in the back room”. It’s fun, it’s educational, and you may wind up with something over your couch that isn’t insipid.
just some info…Barbara Archer gallery has sold work to the High Museum, as has Sandler Hudson. I wish both Marilyn and Nancy the best, and a heartfelt thank you for having maintained your galleries open for so long in Atlanta.
I would like to second the observation by bab about interior designers. I’ve been a guest in too many homes where a lot of money had obviously been spent on the furniture, the curtains, and the kitchen countertops, but what little art there was on the walls was dreck. Or ” bland contemporary paintings serving as formulaic accessories.”
Designers may want to point the finger back at clients who are lacking in knowledge or interest, and that may sometimes be the case. But in the instances I’m familiar with no one had bothered to educate the Atlanta newcomer about the possibilities here.
I’m sorry to see two of my favorite galleries closing, but the sky isn’t falling. Atlanta, along with Boston, Houston, Seattle, and other cities will continue to have excellent galleries.
That said, I want to endorse the sentiment that “Collectors should play a more active role in Atlanta’s art ecology by patronizing galleries and learning about their community’s artists.” I’ve been buying from Atlanta galleries for years. We are fortunate to have a number of superb gallery owners who are dedicated to advancing the careers of artists, and who take the time to educate collectors (including the people who come in to visit for years before buying something). I’ve bought Atlanta artists, yes, but also out-of-town artists who have New York galleries, and I got a slightly better price by buying here. And when it comes to material which simply isn’t available here (in my case surrealist drawings, mostly from the 30s and 40s), Atlanta galleries have been gracious and helpful in steering me to the best New York dealers for such things. Any Atlanta collectors who aren’t getting to know the Atlanta galleries well are just being foolish.
By the way, the High has recently been buying more work by local artists, and yes, it has done so through local galleries. For instance, the museum recently acquired two works by Yanique Norman, through SandlerHudson.
I’m surprised interior designers are not mentioned as playing a critical role in this process. Atlanta’s designers should be, but are not always, instrumental in introducing local galleries and artists to their clients (i.e. those with the most cash to invest in art and the most wall space). While some designers place art for art’s sake in high priority, I’ve also been witness to too many expensively decorated Atlanta homes with bland contemporary paintings serving as formulaic accessories.
Our one significant collecting institution, the High Musem, to my knowledge never bought anything through an Atlanta dealer. Local gallerists have not been embraced by the other non profits. Though I support their overall mission, this failure has been a part of the lack of a collecting impetus in Atlanta. People get their cars and their houses, and only a few really value art for themselves.
It will be difficult to fill the shoes of Marilyn and Nancy.
http://muckrakelabs.blogspot.com/2011/11/il-concetto-con-linterpretazione.html
ok, gotta add something.
NY is great. I’d love to be able to afford to live there at least a few years.
But when it comes to places where the art is breaking ground, it’s no longer the gatekeeper it was. Berlin, China are far more interesting as incubators, and with the internet, groundbreaking happens just about anywhere anyway. NYC is now the Hollywood of the artworld. It’s not where most of the most interesting works are made, but it still holds historical weight, and is a centralized location that helps move the money around in the markets. But even the great NYC lags in some ways. Case in point, Roberta Smith, writing for the illustrious NYTimes:
“For example, Mr. Cattelan’s best-known, most controversial work, “La Nona Ora,” the life-size wax effigy of the downed pope, is usually installed on an immense expanse of red carpet amid shattered glass. It is as if an act of God (who else?) had just plunged the rock through the rose window of a large cathedral during high Mass. (The work’s title, which translates as “The Ninth Hour,” refers to the time that Christ died on the cross.)”
And I thought that NYC was far from the bible belt. Ugh. The whole strength of “La Nona Ora” is that it is a METEOR that hits the Pope – that it is a RANDOM act of the universe that strikes him down. NOT that it was “god”. Good grief.
So anyway, NYC is amazing and a city that stands in a class of its own. But it is not any place that should be followed, unless those following always want to be behind in achieving their goals, while missing out on great opportunities to surpass them.
i.must.make.this.short.or.head.will.explode…
it may never be new york. and that’s good, since ny is already there and all, you know, being ny.
but um, the point is, having this conversation over and over again only reinforces the stigma.
stop.
everyone who knows better, dealers, artists, critics, whoever, needs to get in a room and cut their palms and shake on a deal to never tolerate this entire topic again. and instead of making themed group shows, make shows that throw metaphorical bombs into the living rooms of dealers around the world. while remembering that even that will not likely gain the bling city status that so many seem to want, but it will up the level of quality and sheer balls of the arts scene in the city of atl. which is all that should matter in the first place.
i have some metphorical molotov to donate, if necessary. but it’ll have to be sent c.o.d.
Cheers to Marilyn and Nancy. They consistently exhibited important work in their beautiful galleries. I welcome them into the exclusive club of former Atlanta art dealers. The inside joke is that the Betty Ford Clinic has a separate wing for former art dealers who are trying to kick the art habit. While you two magnificent gallerists may no longer choose to express your creativity within the confines of your white walls, the love of art and your creative expression runs deep and forever affects your soul. After I closed my first gallery, I found my peace in enjoying art on my terms. I no longer had to run through the Rolodex of potentials clients in my head when I saw a great piece of work. I was now able to simply enjoy and love art – it became a pure and untarnished appreciation.
The situation illustrated by Mr. Avery’s complaint to Mr. Shapiro that’s common to other creative industries also happens in Atlanta’s film community, specifically for actors. When projects come to town, everything above the “five lines and under” parts gets cast out of New York and L.A., even if the actors are actually based in Atlanta (meaning actors would have flown out or up, to audition out of town, for a job just around the corner).
The phenomenon seems to be that no matter where the projects originate, the doling out of “pieces of the pie” amounts to favors, so from a producer or director’s standpoint, it’s better to be able to call in those favors… back in L.A. or New York. Even if you are Atlanta-based, wouldn’t you rather have an L.A. publicist/agent/distributor owing you a favor, rather than someone working on North Avenue. Where do you want your free lunch: at Lenox or Silver Lake / Chelsea?
Sad, but true. The other option is that you generate home-grown, home-harvested projects… but you might have to be content that they won’t get the same national profile that coastal-derived projects do. But then again, maybe they will.
Great article Catherine.
Like many other things finally coming into the public spotlight lately, this self-fulfilling ‘precipice’ Atlanta always seems to be on needs to be drug out into the light for all to see, once and for all. More importantly, the people and institutions who continue to perpetuate this extremely tired and one-dimensional cliche of a ‘New York pedigree’ as being the one and only determinate of artistic worth and merit need to be held accountable, or at least challenged, on their outdated and predictable misperception of what they feel is going to further the art scene in which they’re located.
I mean have you been to Chelsea lately? 95% of what’s being shown there is garbage, and pretty much everyone knows it…and choose to ignore the fact in the same breath.
At great expense of her own, Nancy, through Solomon Projects, has given myself and many other artists the time, resources, and space to create. Without that vision I can’t even imagine where my career would be today.
Nancy literally sat me at the table with amazing collectors, and creative minds all over the world. Introduced me to architects, curators, critics and her family. I had the privilege of presenting 3 solo shows with Solomon Projects. Every show was unique and allowed me to live in the moment, expressing my interests and passions unconditionally.
Solomon Projects closing is a tragedy for the city. Nancy has run the gallery with great passion for art and her artists. As one of my dearest friends, I know she will apply her passion to her future projects, whatever and wherever they may be.
Nancy, I wish you happiness, health, and love. I thank you for the opportunities that you have given me. With much love and respect, it is safe to say, Solomon Projects created a solid foundation for my future.