Cristin Tierney

In recent weeks, stories about the most terrifying status quo often obscures the fact that for many experienced art dealers now, there is less time to sit down and figure out how to keep going. Others are making strategic moves such as resettlement at a time when the headlines are dominated by galleries whose closed headlines are being dominated by galleries. One of them is Cristin Tierney, whose business is small and serious and opened a brand new space last week in the arts district that is now dominated by New York. Her bets are not only on her gallery, but also on a medium-sized independent dealer that may still be important.

On a late summer afternoon, Tierney leaned casually on the ladder at the doorstep of her new space, her simple cotton dress and cozy grey sneakers were stains and dust-free as she was on the building around her. This is Tierney’s fourth building in her fifteen years as an art dealer. She moved from Tribeca to Bowery for six years, almost enough to count as downtown, but far enough in New York’s discourse that it’s completely different. Unlike her former space, Tierney now has a floor of windows on the block Passersby that he really sees. fifteen– A huge group performance, marked the gallery’s 15^Th Anniversary – is the first exhibition here.

Tierney is famous for himself for exhibitions of prejudice brains and concepts. Her first exhibition at Tribeca fifteenmake her case. It gathers more than thirty artists whose practices shape the gallery’s identity: Dread Scott, his 2007 screen patch Imagine a world without America Distributed on the world map of the United States; Mary Lucier and Peter Campus, pioneers of videos; Judy Pfaff and Shaun Leonardo’s performances wrestle with race, masculinity and strength. MK Guth’s Read aloud It will be held at the opening and brunch reception, and the disguised “guests” suddenly recite the passage about Tribeca until the room becomes a chorus of overlapping narratives. Meanwhile, Tim You’ll spend a few weeks replaying Jay McInerney’s Bright lights, big cityIn the same community that once served as McInerney’s muse, smash novels into near-fusion novels. This is not the kind of exhibition designed to kill Instagrammant or acquire opening night.

But all of this is supported, the work that Tierney does in the secondary market, and the model she says is in the Castelli tradition that invokes the late Leo Castelli’s willingness to carry those working, demanding or unproven artists and subsidize them with sales in the secondary market. ((She told Artnet that she told Artnet on the 2016 “Intermediate Market Squeeze.” Her reputation in the secondary market has solidified her reputation with Washington collector Anita Reiner, whose owners include the Basquiat sold in Christie in 2014, for nearly $35 million. After the auction, Christie handed over the legacy to Tierney and later advised on the hundreds of remaining works. Some have been placed in institutions such as Hirshhorn, the National Gallery and the Phillips series; others have been sold privately, including works by El Anatsui, Marlene Dumas, Sterling Ruby and Sean Scully.

“We always take our approach to careers, not canvas,” Tierney said of her front room plan, lamenting how art fairs dominate collectors’ perception of the market. “The fair is about single sales, but the gallery has to be about maintaining a career.” She adds, and she prefers smaller, focused fairs like 31 Booth Independent 20^Th Last week, she performed a solo in her work from the 80s and 90s as a curtain shooter for the gallery exhibition Pfaff next month.

Tierney’s first art world job was at auction houses—she worked in Christie’s education department, where she found herself teaching, including John and Barbara Vogelstein, David Mugrabi, and a group of lawyers, bankers and doctors who wanted to learn how to look at it before buying. She realized that education is a form of client development. “If you can shape their eyes, you can shape their collection,” she said. This insight led her to conduct a consulting business where she conducted private workshops and directed acquisitions outside the auction house.

When she decided to open a gallery in 2010, Chelsea was still the gravity center of the art world at the time, and it was the obvious choice. Her first exhibition is dedicated to videos and ambitious installations: the troubled videos of Peter Campus and the 69-foot mountain structure of Alois Kronschlaeger. Tierney recalled those early shows, “I learned from the minimum that you can achieve the best results.”

As Tierney recalls, Chelsea was a place of friendship at the time: everyone gathered nearby to open up to each other, chatting, arguing and building relationships. However, this culture has evaporated and has gradually been replaced by the atomization and trading rhythm of expos and online sales. For Tierney, the move to Tribeca is partly about regaining this sense of community.

Survival as a mid-sized gallery in New York has been unstable, but according to Tierney, despite a sometimes thriving market, it has been cruel for the past fifteen years. Rents climbed, and large Galia became larger and larger, hollowed out in the middle. Tim Blum’s recent shutdown resonated with her because it confirmed what many dealers already know: The system rewards extremes and punishes everyone in between. For her, the failure of closure is too fatigued: the treadmill of the art fair, the pressure of growth or death, the endless struggle to gain attention in the shrinking media ecosystem – and even successful dealers are burned down.

She calls diversified revenue sources for all of them: consulting work, secondary market sales, evaluation – targeting turbulent markets. She said galleries cannot survive on just one source of income.

Moving to Walker Street transforms Tierney into the city’s most vibrant area along with a generation of independent dealers (PPOW in Canada, Miguel Abreu).

In the coming year, she planned a solo, two-person and group exhibition designed to test every corner of the new space. PFAFF’s October solo will host the program, but the broader ambitions are clear: video, performance, conduct performance, rejecting more space for large-scale works that fit the framework. fifteen It’s the overture; the next action begins now.

Regardless of the future, despite what she does in the secondary market, Tierney set out to keep her front room challenging rather than jumping on the trend. The dealer is “a part of the salesman and part of proselytizer. It’s easy to become an artist when selling paintings.” Her work on PFAFF’s 80s and 90s exhibited last week was Pfaff’s signature work, more of the Serer Sell. But for the upcoming show, she told PFAFF: “Do whatever you want.”