The Manhattan Gallery Long story short is hosting a new type of exhibition this summer: instead of calling on artists, it has asked 94 gallery owners to create the works on display. Each piece is on sale for $500, but buyers won’t know who created what until the show ends on July 30.
Title Art dealers (by), the exhibition opened on Friday July 7 with a jam-packed opening. Sunday afternoon, the walls of the gallery were speckled with red dots: 64 works had been sold. All proceeds go to Lower East Side Girls’ Cluba non-profit organization that provides educational programs and wellness services to the city’s youth.
Long Story Short opened its Lower Manhattan location in 2022 and focuses on emerging artists. Its owner, Will Leung, hopes the project will bring galleries and buyers together.
“The majority of dealers are right next to each other,” Leung said of how New York’s galleries are geographically clustered. “And they don’t really talk to each other much.” He imagines a buyer discovering that his newly purchased artwork was created by someone he had never heard of, then visiting his gallery and developing a relationship.
“It’s funny when I watch people buy the job,” Leung said. “They think they’re buying the right one, and I can’t wait to see the look on their faces when they find out it’s not the dealer they expected.”
The show’s “artists” range from top-notch mega-gallery dealers to managers of small and new outposts, but Leung wanted to encourage viewers to shop based simply on the works they wanted to bring home. house and live with it.
“It’s hard if you don’t make art regularly,” said gallerist Derek Eller, one of the exhibit participants. Hyperallergic. “There’s this question, ‘What do I want to make an artwork out of and how do I go about it? “” Eller, who moved to New York at 23 to become an artist, said he hasn’t done art in the 26 years since he opened his eponymous gallery. Still, the dealer said he became obsessed with the project. “I ended up prioritizing it over my work,” he said.
Some of the works on display are meticulously detailed. Others seem to have been made the day before the opening. Pets make frequent appearances, but other works are stranger. A canvas with words scribbled in essential oils scents the entire room, and a merchant has made a plastic toy snake peeking out of a mail slot. Almost all participants adhered to the size requirement of nine by 12 inches.
The exhibition includes a number of works that appear to be autobiographical. One depicts an artist’s studio littered with cigarettes and Diet Coke cans. A delicate design depicts the now closed Spitzer’s Corner restaurant on the corner of Ludlow and Rivington streets.
Other submissions have a self-deprecating or humorous tone. One says “I don’t know if this is really art”, and another is covered in foil that says “remove after purchase”. Both have been sold. Another piece of artwork, which the creator reportedly described as a “landscape,” features printed envelopes filled with six $100 bills. (Leung assured that the banknotes were real and noted that the buyer of the artwork had in fact won $100.)
Kathy Huang, general manager of the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, partnered with Leung to mount the exhibition. They came up with the idea last fall while spending time with Anna Park and Mike Lee, two artists who were participating in upcoming charity exhibitions. Huang explained that events often force artists to make small works of art without notice.
“I don’t know if many dealers realize how difficult it is to do a small job,” Huang said. “There really isn’t much room for error.” This spring, Huang and Leung sent invitations and instructions to Art dealers (by) around 150 gallery owners; 130 initially said yes, but only 94 ultimately participated.
“I’m honest, at first I said, ‘No, I can’t do art,'” said Brandy Carstens, senior director of the Matthew Brown Gallery in Los Angeles. Hyperallergic. “But Kathy and Will were super encouraging, and the idea behind the show is fantastic. It’s for a good cause, and a lot of dealers started out as artists (myself included). It was humbling trying to make something good (I didn’t).
