Late last month, I found myself on the outskirts of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in the town of Diriyah, standing in front of the recently opened Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMOCA) and looking out at a vista that, as one local arts professional observed, captures what the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is all about. Before me, I could see the tranquil Wadi Hanifah valley where the locals of Diriyah gather for leisure activities, all the way to the distant towers of the $10 billion King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) development in central Riyadh. SAMOCA is situated in Diriyah’s JAX District, a creative hub of warehouses that now hold art and film studios but, until recently, was home to car repair shops. Diriyah itself, considered the historic birthplace of the kingdom, is a $63 billion development that will feature multiple museums and hotels. It all makes for a dizzying layer cake of past, present, and future.

I was in Riyadh for the opening of the third annual edition of the two-week-long Noor Riyadh, a citywide festival of artworks involving light by both Saudi and international artists. The festival couldn’t help but illuminate the array of projects currently underway as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s sweeping Vision 2030 initiative to reduce the country’s reliance on oil and diversify the economy.
 
Weeks before my arrival, news broke that Riyadh would likely host the 2034 World Cup. On the day I arrived, it was announced that the city would host the World Expo 2030. In Paris, Laurent Le Bon, president of the Centre Pompidou, and Amr Almadani, CEO of the Royal Commission for AlUla, signed a formal agreement to collaborate on a new contemporary art space to open in AlUla in 2027. Early this coming February, the third edition of Desert X AlUla opens, as will, a few weeks later, the second edition of the Diriyah Biennale, KSA’s first art biennale, in Riyadh. Then, in two to three years, Wadi AlFann (“Valley of the Arts”), a 40-square-mile site featuring monumental site-specific permanent land artworks, will open at AlUla. At his studio in the JAX District, Saudi artist Ahmed Mater showed me renderings for his project for Wadi AlFann, an enormous structure that produces a mirage.
 
It can be difficult to remember what entity oversees which project in KSA. SAMOCA, an 18,000-square-foot kunsthalle, is a project of the Museums Commission, which is run by the Ministry of Culture. So is the still-in-development museum for modern and contemporary art that, with its permanent collection, will dwarf SAMOCA. The Diriyah Biennale Foundation, also under the Ministry of Culture, is partnering with real estate developer ROSHN, a company set up by the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund to increase home ownership across Saudi Arabia to 70 percent by 2030. Noor Riyadh, meanwhile, falls under the public initiative Riyadh Art, which is overseen by the Royal Commission for Riyadh City, whose board chairman is bin Salman. It takes an org chart just to keep track it all.
 
And there is more: directly across the street from the JAX District, during Noor Riyadh, the ATHR Foundation opened the eighth and largest edition of its Young Saudi Artists Exhibition, showing 25 emerging talents drawn from an open call. The ATHR Foundation was set up last year by the founders of the Jeddah-based ATHR gallery, one of KSA’s most prominent commercial spaces, with a mission to help artists navigate the art system, as well as to advise local private and public entities on their cultural endeavors. The exhibition took place in a residential building called ETHR, which is part of the ATHR mission to help arts professionals (both homegrown and international) seeking access to the JAX resources.
 
The majority of the pieces in Noor Riyadh were brand-new, and several were spectacular, but, for me, the one that stole the show was older: Fühlometer (Feel-o-meter), a 2008 piece made by German artist Julius von Bismarck in collaboration with experimental designer Benjamin Maus and filmmaker Richard Wilhelmer. On the roof of a building in the KAFD, von Bismarck had installed a 26-foot-high smiley face illuminated with fluorescent tubes. Visible from miles away—and a nice diversion while stuck in traffic on one of the many highways that loop around the city—the face changes its expression using software that analyzes peoples’ expressions gathered from surveillance cameras set up around the area. The face smiles when the city smiles, frowns when the city frowns, and displays every emoji-able expression in between. The artwork would seem to be a direct reference to KAFD’s rapid development as a smart city: it was reported in September that Orange Business, the French telecom company that has moved aggressively into big data and AI, had closed a deal that will see it building geolocation-based sentiment analysis of social media and other features into the existing KAFD digital infrastructure.
 
Another poignant piece in Noor Riyadh was in the tranquil Wadi Hanifah park, where French artist Bruno Ribeiro erected a 65-foot-high sculpture of an oil derrick on which foreboding light patterns coordinated to the sound of an ominous booming techno soundtrack. The piece was called All Is Well.
 
It was only as I was leaving KSA that I realized how close I’d been, in the JAX District, to a space dedicated to showing the Saudi public scale models and computer renderings of The Line, a 110-mile-long “linear smart city” that is part of the futuristic $500 billion, 16,000-square-mile sustainable living giga-project NEOM. Unable to visit, I watched a video presentation of The Line on my phone on the way to the airport, thinking how easy it was to chalk it all up to some kind of utopian—or perhaps dystopian—sci-fi fantasy. The project is proposed to have some 9 million people living in a car-less urban area serviced by a high-speed rail system. But then, at the airport, I spoke with a UK-based adviser/contractor at a Starbucks who claimed to be working on The Line. He’d seen trucks there, he told me, he’d seen materials. He said “it’s real.”
 
If, instead of heading back to New York, I had taken a two-hour flight east, to Dubai, I would have arrived just in time for the start of the UN Climate Summit. In the weeks that followed, the Saudi contingent at the conference went on to lead a group of major oil exporters in resisting a deal calling for a complete phaseout of fossil fuels. (In the end, a compromise deal was reached that, while still historic, calls instead for “transitioning away from fossil fuels.”) The New York Times, in a story on the negotiations, pointed to what analysts say is an obvious paradox: “Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is spending tens of billions of dollars to try to diversify the Saudi economy, investing in industries like renewable energy, tourism, entertainment and artificial intelligence. Paradoxically, that means the government needs oil revenue to fund its plans for life after oil.”

“I developed an interest in Ambera’s work and, in discussions with her, and then with Sophie [Morner, the owner of Company Gallery], I thought [collaboration] would serve the artist better, as well as support a gallery that is doing a great job in New York,” Hauser & Wirth co-president Marc Payot told ARTnews.

Morner, who opened Company in 2015, said of Wellmann, that “a joint partnership will be the strongest way to support her career right now.”

Wellmann, who is in her early forties and whose paintings depict abstracted bodies intertwined in erotic scenarios, joined Company in 2020 and had her first solo show there the following year. Since then, she has had solo exhibitions at Pond Society, the Shanghai space run by collector Yang Bin, the Metropolitan Art Centre in Belfast, Ireland, and, last April, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, a private museum founded by collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 1995.

Morner said she was attracted to the idea of a closely collaborative representation because she’s been interested in new gallery models and how younger galleries like her own can continue to work with artists as they grow.

“If anyone is going to change these gallery models, it’s the galleries like Hauser & Wirth,” Morner said. “If the bigger galleries start thinking outside the box about what is best for the artists. Because it’s not always best for the artists to leave a young gallery for a big one.”

Company has proved to be one of the more ambitious spaces to open in New York over the past decade. In 2021 Morner moved Company from its original modest space in downtown Manhattan, to a 4,000-square-foot, stand-alone space on Elizabeth Street nearby in Chinatown. She said she sees her gallery as “constantly growing and expanding.” At the same time, at least one artist has departed. The new space opened with an exhibition of work by Barbara Hammer, curated by gallery artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Shortly afterward, McClodden left Company for a larger gallery, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, and then an even larger one, White Cube.

Payot characterizes the collective impact initiative as an “entrepreneurial model” that he hopes will “support an ecosystem,” before adding that he would be happy if it is copied by other large galleries.

“I don’t see myself as having created something that unique. It hopefully will change some structures within our system,” he said.

Payot added that working with Nicola Vassell on Uman, the first shared artist in the initiative, at last week’s Art Basel Miami Beach fair “went incredibly well, and that in itself is a message true to the art world that things can maybe done a little bit differently.”

A little over a year ago, just as the art world was emerging from the pandemic, Marc Payot, co-president of mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, and dealer Nicola Vassell started having conversations about the challenges of the current gallery ecosystem. Vassell had opened her eponymous New York gallery in 2021, after stints working for Deitch and Pace galleries, and as an independent consultant. As Vassell recalls it, the conversations led to the question of the challenges faced by galleries of different scales. Was there a way. they wondered, that galleries could work together to support a thriving ecosystem, rather than one where artists left galleries like Vassell’s for those like Hauser?

“We all had a lot of time to think during the pandemic,” Payot told ARTnews recently, “and I came to the realization that the art world is in a state where the few very large successful galleries are becoming more and more successful and larger, and for the rest of the ecosystem, things are very tough.”

In the meantime, Payot became interested in an artist Vassell represents, the painter Uman. The two dealers decided to give a new arrangement a shot: a full partnership that will be the first in a new initiative for Hauser & Wirth modeled on a framework of collective impact.

Collective impact is a model that became popular in philanthropic circles around 2011. It refers to an intense partnership between organizations (often ones of different scales) to accomplish a shared goal. The criteria for such a relationship are a common agenda, a shared measurement system, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and a backbone organization. In the case of Hauser and Vassell, they’ll be leaning on transparency and “intensive resource sharing” to develop the partnership.

“It’s an entrepreneurial way of thinking differently in order to develop the career of an artist, on one hand, and, on the other hand, to support a smaller gallery in its development,” Payot said of Hauser and Vassell usage of collective impact.

Vassell started working with the Somali-born, upstate New York-based Uman shortly after opening her gallery, and the works have caught on with collectors. Uman started out selling art on the street in New York in the early 2000s, before a 2015 show at the alternative space White Columns. Downtown New York dealer David Fierman, founder of Fierman gallery, worked with the artist for three years, at Fierman and previously at Louis B. James gallery, and sold her work to both collectors and institutions. Vassell, who began representing Uman in 2022, sold out a booth of the artist’s paintings at the Independent Fair that year, and had a successful solo show with Uman this past spring.

“She is a remarkable artist,” Vassell told ARTnews. “A once-in-a-generation talent. And her work has this capacity for evolution. She needs an outlet to express that that reaches far and wide. But that gives fuel to the capacity to evolve.”

Fiercely protecting such artists from the incursion of larger suitors, Vassell said, is not a good way to further their careers. “When you have a talent like Uman in your stable the reflex might be to build a wall,” she said, “but I’ve been in the business long enough to understand that you can’t challenge a talent that may not stay in place. So you widen the circumference, recognizing the global forces of the market.”

The idea, Vassell said, is to have the best of both worlds: the important context of the smaller gallery, and the support system of the mega. Move to a mega too soon, and a young artist can get lost; stay too long with a smaller gallery and an artist can start to feel suffocated. “It’s the ability to have the sum total of two different, but potent support systems, to create an amplified advantage.”

Artists having more than one dealer representative is, of course, nothing new. When an artist is represented by more than one gallery, things often split along geographical lines: one gallery in Europe, for instance, and another in the U.S. The artist decides which artworks go to which gallery, and for each sale the artist makes a set percentage—50% is standard—and the gallery that sells the work gets 50 percent. (Alternatively, one gallery, the artist’s main representative, can consign work to the another, and take a ten percent profit on the sale.) Under the collective impact arrangement, Hauser & Wirth and Vassell will work as a single team for Uman, sharing their respective networks of collectors and museums, and jointly deciding which artworks go where. The financial split is 50 percent to the artist and 25 percent each to the galleries.

Historically, Hauser & Wirth has taken on numerous artists for worldwide representation, and Payot said that won’t necessarily change. But he sees the non-competitive partnership framework as a step toward mitigating the paradigm where young, modestly sized galleries with rigorous programs, like Vassell’s, risk losing their more successful artists to a larger shop.

“This is not something we will do with every single artist,” he said of the Uman deal. “This is one option among many.”

Such dynamics are hardly new. Around 2016, there was a spate of gallery closures in New York, and many blamed mega-galleries like Hauser & Wirth, Pace, Zwirner and Gagosian for hoovering up artists from younger galleries’ programs, putting them at financial risk. Shortly before the pandemic, certain measures were put into place to help smaller galleries along, like David Zwirner’s suggestion, at a New York Times arts conference in 2018, that the megas help to subsidize their smaller colleagues’ participation in major fairs like Art Basel. Basel implemented the idea just a few months later.

The pandemic may have hit pause on some of these concerns, with art fairs on hold, financial support packages from the government, and the increased ease of selling art online, but recently there has been another round of closures, such as that of Lower East Side favorite JTT, and those concerns about the mega-galleries are back in the spotlight.

Payot says that over the next few months Hauser & Wirth will reveal more of these collective impact relationships. In the meantime, don’t be surprised if you overhear some booth-to-booth conversations between Payot and Vassell at Art Basel Miami next week: both galleries are bringing works by Uman, priced at around $90,000.

The galleries will unveil their first jointly organized exhibition of Uman’s work in January at Hauser & Wirth London.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Uman was based in Buffalo, New York. She is based in upstate New York.

Every corner of this issue incorporates instances of collaboration. The sui generis multi-hyphenate Harmony Korine, who is profiled in these pages, has estalished a new creative lab called EDGLRD that brings together artists from a variety of disciplines. “There is this kind of singularity popping up in the meshing of music and films and art and gaming,” Korine tells Art in America Executive Editor Andy Battaglia. And this issue’s New Talent artist, Edgar Calel, brought the staff of SculptureCenter, where he recently had a show, into the making of his work by having them light candles in an installation.

Also not to be missed is a moving tribute to the masterful painter Brice Marden, who died earlier this year, by critic Barry Schwabsky, who recalls watching people become transfixed by Marden’s paintings. Which goes to show that, in essence, every artwork is a collaboration—one between the artist and the viewer.

FEATURES

Bees & Potatoes
The climate crisis demands that we collaborate better with other species—and artists are showing us how.
by Emily Watlington 

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Machine
Stephen Thaler’s quest to copyright his AI creation raises uncomfortable questions about the nature
of creativity.
by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei 

Furniture
These artists make sculptures you can sit on and tables that tell stories.
by Emily Watlington

Haute Culture
These days, it seems as if there isn’t a luxury fashion brand that doesn’t collaborate with artists. (A special pull-out print accompanies the article.)
by Charlotte Cotton

Sartorial Studies
The New York–based artist collective CFGNY tailors its work to fit into new contexts.
by Claire Voon

Adventures in the Vapor World
Harmony Korine makes his next move—into new realms awaiting his twisted visions.
by Andy Battaglia

DEPARTMENTS

Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Hard Truths
An artist mulls his dealer’s no-confidence vote. Plus, an interactive quiz.
by Chen & Lampert

Sightlines
Curator Meg Onli tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton 

Inquiry
A Q&A with Pipilotti Rist about her pivot to furniture-sculpture hybrids.
by Emily Watlington

Object Lesson
An annotation of Judy Chicago’s In the Shadow of a Handgun.
by Francesca Aton

Battle Royale 
The Met vs. MoMA—museum gift shops face off.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on art and fashion.
by Stephanie Sporn

Appreciation
A tribute to Brice Marden, a painter who embodied painterliness until the end.
by Barry Schwabsky 

New Talent
Guatemalan artist Edgar Calel leads a new wave of institutional critique.
by Alex Greenberger

Issues & Commentary
Climate activists are targeting museums, affirming both the urgency of the crisis and art’s unique political power.
by Michael Wang

Spotlight
Afro-Brazilian artist Rubem Valentim merged modernist abstraction and spiritual symbology.
by Elise Chagas

Book Review
A reading of Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art.
by Emily Watlington

REVIEWS

Berlin
Berlin Diary
by Martin Herbert

Cleveland
“Finnegan Shannon: Don’t mind if I do”
by Emily Watlington 

Seoul
“The Most Honest Confession: Chang Ucchin Retrospective”
by Andrew Russeth

New York
“Manet/Degas”
by Barry Schwabsky 

Chicago
“Remedios Varo: Science Fictions”
by Jeremy Lybarger

New York
“María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold”
by Maximilíano Durón

As the art world emerged from pandemic-related lockdown, the arrangement appeared auspicious: in June 2022 the partners announced they would open a branch in Los Angeles, which had recently become a magnet for New York galleries. But then, last December, came news that superstar painter Gerhard Richter, whom Goodman had represented for almost 40 years, was leaving for gallery giant David Zwirner.

This past February, the partners announced a plan to move the gallery’s longtime headquarters from 57th Street to Tribeca, the city’s hottest new gallery district; upon its planned opening in mid-to-late 2024, Marian Goodman will be among the largest galleries there, at 30,000 square feet, double its current size in Manhattan. Then, the following month brought another artist defection: photographer Nan Goldin, fresh off an Academy Award–nominated documentary about her activism targeting the Sackler family, announced she was joining Gagosian. Goldin had been with Goodman for just five years, but her departure prompted a headline in the New York Times: “Nan Goldin Is Second Major Artist to Exit Marian Goodman Gallery.” And the article’s kicker read like a twist of the knife: “[Goldin] wished nothing but the best for her former dealership: ‘I hope it lasts. I hope it continues.’”

Succession plans at galleries have been a hot topic of late, esteemed dealers like Paula Cooper, Larry Gagosian, Barbara Gladstone, and Paul Kasmin (who died two years ago) implementing such plans. Now, with the new LA space having opened in late September with a show by Steve McQueen, the question remains: is the Goodman brand strong enough to outlive the presence of Marian Goodman?

Goodman made her name as a serious and rigorous artist advocate who worked closely with museums to develop their careers. The gallery was long defined by the tight-knit nature of its artist stable. They gathered for milestones like the gallery’s 30th anniversary in 2007, and again in 2018 for Goodman’s own 90th birthday at no less noteworthy a location than the palace and gardens at Versailles, a soiree attended by the directors of the world’s most prominent museums and capped with a fireworks display.

As the art world became increasingly financialized and galleries expanded, Goodman focused on the primary market more than the secondary, where money is always waiting to be made. She opened in Paris in 1995, but her expansion paused there until a short-lived space opened in London a few years ago. She cultivated a reputation as the opposite of the sharklike Gagosian. Years before he left her ranks, Richter compared the two dealers in the Financial Times, saying that Goodman “has a kind of moral ethic. It’s not only business. Business is easy. I could never show at Gagosian.” A 2004 profile of Goodman in the New Yorker made the distinction even clearer: “‘Gallerist’ is the word she prefers for herself; she dislikes ‘dealer,’” wrote Peter Schjeldahl. “What’s the difference? She couldn’t exactly say. Perhaps she … is spooked by the shadiness that clings to her profession.”

The gallerist’s good standing gave her the pick of the litter when it came to luring younger talent, as she did around that time with Maurizio Cattelan and Gabriel Orozco, as well as established artists like William Kentridge. Goodman continued to add high-profile names to her roster: Tino Sehgal, Julie Mehretu, and the estate of Francesca Woodman. But as she reached her 90s, Goodman began to step back from the gallery—and momentous changes followed. Two titans of Conceptual art who had long been a part of her gallery—John Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner—died within two years of each other. And as the global pandemic took hold, the effects of Goodman’s absence amplified. “The last three or four years of Marian being involved in an intense and intimate way in the running of the gallery corresponded to the first years of Covid,” Kentridge told ARTnews. “In a way, her absence from the gallery feels like yet another example of long Covid.”

With the exception of Kaiser, who joined Marian Goodman in 2019, the partners now in charge represent a wealth of institutional knowledge. Rose Lord and Leslie Nolen have each been there for more than 20 years. Junette Teng, who started out as Goodman’s assistant, has been there for a little over 15. Emily-Jane Kirwan has worked at the gallery, in two stints, for 11 years.

In a wide-ranging interview this past June, Kaiser, Lord, and Kirwan told ARTnews about their plans for the future, collectively emphasizing both continuity and change. (Lord and Kirwan serve as managing partners and are responsible for overseeing the overall operational and sales strategy of the gallery.) While Goodman had long vetoed a move from 57th Street, Kaiser said he sees the forthcoming Tribeca space as a means to expand the gallery’s audience. Like Goodman, however, the partners are resistant to becoming a mega-gallery with venues around the world, and vowed not to expand the gallery’s footprint significantly.

While gallery heavyweights represent 80 or more artists, Goodman has 30, and nobody at the top wants to grow far beyond that. “We want to maintain an individualized boutique relationship with our artists, avoiding what can become a diluted situation,” Kirwan said. Kaiser agreed: “When we expand, we don’t want to pick up [just] any artist. The megas have started to just expand and be more speculative. We are one of the few ‘program galleries.’”

About Richter’s departure, Kaiser said the change did not come as much of a surprise. “Marian is turning 95. Richter is around the same age. He wanted to change parameters at the end of his life. He was non-sentimental about that. We would have loved to deal with his last chapter and estate. We were disappointed, but it is what it is. We have many other great artists.”

In 2014 Pierre Huyghe joined Hauser & Wirth, and presented a show in their London gallery, while remaining with Esther Schipper in Berlin and Marian Goodman in New York. Two years later, Jeff Wall left Goodman entirely for Gagosian, after 25 years. This past June, Francesca Woodman’s estate departed for Gagosian as well. Last year, Kentridge mounted shows with Hauser & Wirth in Hong Kong and Gstaad, Switzerland. He is rumored to have been in talks to join Hauser & Wirth over the past year or so, but, over the summer, he was actively organizing a show with Goodman that opened earlier this fall; he told ARTnews he planned to remain with the gallery. “Over the 20 years that I have been with the gallery, my conversations were almost entirely with Marian,” Kentridge said. “So a new modus vivendi has to find its shape.” He expressed encouragement around the future plans for New York and LA, but, in advance of his first exhibition since Goodman stepped away from operations, said he was waiting to see how his arrangement might change. “Only then will I know how it feels under its new direction.”

At the same time, the partners have brought on new talent and estates. The gallery was chosen in 2020 to represent the Holt/Smithson Foundation, which oversees the estates of Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt. Tavares Strachan and Andrea Fraser have come aboard. In October, Goodman’s Paris branch will host its first show with newly signed artist Delcy Morelos, one of the stars of the 2022 Venice Biennale.

Goodman’s stable has always been more critically acclaimed than market minded. Richter, whose paintings have been selling for more than $20 million for the past 10 years and whose auction market generated $225 million in 2022 alone, was a notable exception. The other is Ethiopia-born, New York–based painter Julie Mehretu, whose record at auction reached $6.5 million in 2021, making her the fifth-most-expensive living female artist at auction. Mehretu showed with White Cube gallery in London before she began with Goodman in New York; this fall, White Cube, an enterprise with strong positions in the secondary market, is opening a new space on the Upper East Side of New York.

Kaiser acknowledged that Goodman herself  “never focused purely on the secondary market. I don’t want to say she neglected it, but she wasn’t so interested in it. But if you build an artist’s career, then clients circle back to you [with artworks] and you need to be mindful, and deal with that. We have an open mind about that.”

Mehretu has plans for a show at the upcoming Marian Goodman space in Tribeca and, in August, told ARTnews that, while she has been approached by other galleries, she remains happy at Goodman, and confident about the new partners. “[Other dealers] have wanted to meet,” Mehretu said, but “I’ve been clear that I’m content and have no desire to do anything at the moment, and they have been respectful. At the moment, I feel very much supported in the ways that I need to be.”

She values the close relationship she has had with Goodman, and said the partners have “her same ethos, her same capability. They were the ones that instituted so much of her work—they’re very artist-centric. We’ll see what happens, but I think a lot of us [artists] have a lot of faith and excitement, and comfort in how the partners have decided to move forward.”

“As Marian withdrew, we took on more and more of the day-to-day running and working with the artists,” Lord, one of the managing partners, said over the summer. “We’ve been here for such a long time. It’s a natural progression.” But sources close to the gallery and to Goodman told ARTnews that—not unusually for a determined founder with a strong vision—Goodman was always controlling and proprietary of her operation, and not particularly empowering to her directors. In a rare interview in 2016, Goodman told the New York Times, “I would like [the gallery] to carry on, and I am in the process of thinking about that. But I think I’ll carry on until I can’t.”

Other galleries, like David Zwirner, have promoted directors to be partners earlier in their tenure. According to sources, there have been times during which Goodman seemed close to bringing in a partner or elevating a director to a leadership position. One such occasion was in the early 2000s, when Robin Vousden, an 18-year veteran of London’s Anthony D’Offay Gallery, came to New York to work for Goodman. That lasted just two years: Vousden returned to London in 2004 to work for Gagosian.

Between 2014 and 2019, Goodman seemed to be grooming Andrew Leslie Heyward, who initially ran her Paris location and then took charge of the London space as well. A former director at Matthew Marks who ran his own gallery in the early 2000s, Heyward “was very close with Marian, and I saw him as potentially being part of the future of the gallery and a succession,” said Julie Miyoshi, a Los Angeles–based art adviser who has worked with the gallery since 2008. Another adviser recalled Heyward as a consistent presence alongside Goodman at dinners and other events. Heyward brought Nan Goldin, who had showed with Marks, over to the roster. But by late summer 2019, Heyward was no longer with the gallery, and in 2020, Goodman closed the London space over concerns about Brexit and Covid. (Heyward now works for Gagosian, where Goldin has moved.)

In 2020 executive director Jessie Washburne-Harris, who had joined Goodman in 2014 after working for Gagosian and then running her own gallery, was offered a leadership position—but declined. She departed in summer 2021 to become a vice president at Pace Gallery and, weeks later, Goodman announced the present leadership structure, with Kaiser as president. Asked about the leadup to that, the partners sent ARTnews a collective statement: “The individuals cited played important roles within the gallery’s history. Marian considered a few different scenarios through the years before ultimately deciding upon the partnership structure that was announced.”

Goodman brought on the Swiss-born Kaiser in early 2019 as chief executive director of artists and programs in charge of exhibitions at the gallery’s three locations at the time—New York, London, and Paris. With over 20 years of experience in the museum world, Kaiser had developed a reputation as a curator, most recently in Los Angeles, where he worked for five years at MOCA LA, and on a Cindy Sherman exhibition at the Broad. Heading up the gallery, he will be leaning heavily on the partners; before Goodman, his only experience helming an institution was as director of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, where he worked for little more than a year, starting in 2012. Though he said he now sells art at Goodman, he leaves much of the commercial aspects of the business to the partners.

“When Philipp started with the gallery, I started seeing the possibility of a succession …,” adviser Miyoshi said. Kaiser had “a synergy with Marian,” she added. “And it made sense to me, with his background. He’s continuing her legacy, carrying on her rigorous vision.”

At least one major ARTnews Top 200 Collector agreed. Emily Rales, who with her husband, Mitchell, has acquired numerous works from the gallery for their private museum, Glenstone, said, “The gallery partners are art world veterans whom we have known for decades, and we continue to work with them to identify mid-career artists for Glenstone’s collection. I have complete confidence in the partners to uphold Marian’s uncompromising standards while at the same time growing the program and securing the future of the gallery.” 

A version of this article appears in the 2023 ARTnews Top 200 Collectors issue.

Last fall, Frieze London opened to lengthy lines for VIP collectors, prompting complaints from exhibitors. While Frieze solved the problem in time for its 20th anniversary edition—entry at this year’s opening VIP preview at 11 a.m. was smooth and swift—the market appears to be on shaky ground. Last week’s sale of works from Shanghai’s Long Museum was just the latest auction this year to disappoint, as the major houses all reported double-digit percentage drops in revenue in the first half of 2023. Meanwhile, just days before the fair opened, Hamas launched an assault on southern Israel, leading the country to initiate a bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip.

At the fair Wednesday, the conflict might as well have not been happening. The aisles were packed and the mood was as buoyant as ever. There were hints around the edges—dealers said some events had been canceled, some collectors nixed travel plans, and others said they were not ready to follow through on purchases they’d been considering before the fair opened. One dealer said he witnessed an argument between two collectors in his booth about the conflict, albeit a relatively friendly one. Another collector was seen navigating the fair in a baseball cap emblazoned with the Israeli flag. But dealers reported that sales were not impacted, and were rolling along. Major collectors were on hand: Jill and Peter Kraus, the Rubells, Glenn Fuhrman, Amy and John Phelan, Uli Sigg, the list goes on. (For what it’s worth, collector-investors seemed to be out in force, with one declaring, “My art is in Delaware”—ie in a Freeport—“but I have visitation rights.”) And there was the usual dose of celebrity glamor: Andrew Garfield, Rami Malek.

What has changed, according to Philip Hoffman of the Fine Art Fund, is a lack of urgency around purchases. “Everyone is here,” Hoffman told me this afternoon. “But there is no rush to buy. It’s a modest approach. Collectors are not racing to buy.” Given the macro-economic environment of still-hiked global interest rates, Hoffman continued, the mood at Frieze was still “vibrant.” His clients are buying, he said, just being more selective. Hoffman projected another six to twelve months before interest rates lower and the market gets a boost. 

It’s commonly assumed that a wobbly market means dealers will rely more heavily on paintings—they’re desirable to collectors, not to mention easier and cheaper to ship and install than sculpture or installations. But paintings are always popular at art fairs, and I haven’t necessarily seen more of them than usual in London. In at least three cases where paintings are the main event at Frieze booths, they are presented in innovative ways that lean towards installation. At Timothy Taylor, 22 framed drawings and painted work on paper by market darling Eddie Martinez ($12,000–$40,000) are presented against a backdrop of over two thousand smaller, unframed drawings from the artist’s studio, to which they will return after the fair. On the outside wall of the booth is a new painting with an asking price of $275,000 that the gallery has sold to a Texas museum. Meanwhile, at Pilar Corrias, paintings by Sophie von Hellermann that were inspired by Margate’s history as a Victorian-era amusement park (on sale for £10,000–£60,000) are placed against walls that von Hellermann painted with an abstract pattern of brushstrokes. The carpet laid on the booth’s floor is printed with an image of one of von Hellermann’s paintings. The effect is of a Gesamtkunstwerk—an immersive experience of a painter’s world. Over at Thaddaeus Ropac, the outer walls of the booth were papered over with canvas painted by Mandy El-Sayegh, and then hung with her paintings, recreating the effect of her show at the gallery last month.

If the current conflict is having any effect on the art world, it is on the human level, according to Pace CEO Marc Glimcher. “It’s devastating and destabilizing on so many levels,” Glimcher told me over WhatsApp.

“It’s too soon to fully assess the business impact, short or long term. It’s the human impact that we are all focused on presently. We all know or know of someone who has been affected by this violence — artists, collectors, curators and beyond. We do know some people that didn’t come that had planned to, but so far sales are what we expected them to be. Obviously, if the conflict widens it will impact the global economy.”

Correction: A previous version of this story said that Timothy Taylor was selling 12 works on paper by Eddie Martinez for $40,000–$120,000. The gallery is selling 22 works for $12,000-$40,000.

Jackson’s home and studio are in a rambling 19th-century house near Savannah’s historic district. In the front yard, behind an old iron fence, stands a memorial to her son, set up by his friends. She recently had to put up a sign warning people to keep out, after someone went in there to use her water spigot and managed to upset an arrangement of shells. Jackson said an interviewer lately asked her what had been the chief creative sparks in her life. Her answer: “When my son was born, and when my son passed away.”

She mourned his loss by throwing herself into her work: abstract paintings in which she coaxes acrylic paint to act more like sculpture, in a scale that has grown larger and larger. In early 2017, she attended a presentation about artist Nick Cave at the Jepson Center, the major contemporary art museum in Savannah; at the end of the talk, the speaker, Jepson curator Rachel Reese (now Rachel Waldrop), mentioned that she was looking for big work, like Cave’s, for future exhibitions.

Walking through that Cave show before the talk, Jackson had noticed that he referenced the Rodney King beating. At the time, she happened to be wearing bracelets she bought in Los Angeles, in Watts, the day King died. Feeling empowered by the coincidence, she spoke up: “I’m Suzanne Jackson, and I make big paintings.”

Jackson had been making art since the early 1960s, but her peak success in the ’70s was long past, and she’d become better known for Gallery 32, which she founded and ran in Los Angeles for three years in the late ’60s. She showed David Hammons, Dan Cocholar, Betye Saar, and Senga Nengudi, among others, in what was a groundbreaking space.

In 2006, while teaching at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Jackson received an email from a College Art Association (CAA) curator inquiring about Gallery 32. “I thought people had forgotten,” Jackson told me. She wrote back, and was invited to that year’s CAA conference in Boston, where she loaded up her old slides and gave a talk titled “Gallery 32: Risk, Innovation, Survival—Ending the Sixties.”

A conference attendee subsequently organized a show about Gallery 32 at Loyola Marymount University in LA in 2009. “It was fine,” Jackson said. “But then when people heard about Gallery 32, it was all they were asking me about.” Later came the traveling exhibitions “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980” and “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” both of which included references to Gallery 32 as well as Jackson’s older work.

The cumulative attention led to interest in Jackson’s more current work: a group of recent graduates from Hunter College in New York invited her in 2015 to mount a show at Temporary Agency, their artist-run gallery in Ridgewood, Queens. It was there that Jackson debuted her 2013 tondo Woodpecker’s Last Blues, in which acrylic combines with deer netting, woodpecker feathers, leaves, and tar paper.

Things moved quickly in 2019: a show of Jackson’s work at the Jepson Center back in Savannah included Woodpecker’s Last Blues along with 40 other pieces spanning the 1960s to the present, the most recent measuring some 18 feet across. The same year, a gallery called O Townhouse in the same building that had housed Gallery 32, put on a show of Jackson’s recent work. Ales Ortuzar, an art dealer who had worked for mega-gallerist David Zwirner, visited O Townhouse to see work by another artist, and Jackson’s work intrigued him. Having just opened Ortuzar Projects in New York, he flew to Savannah to visit and offered her a show on the spot.

Jackson’s first New York solo outing with an established dealer opened in the fall of 2019 to rave reviews in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Art in America. Ortuzar managed to place paintings with the Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center, as well as with collectors like Pamela Joyner and Komal Shah. More shows followed, including one at Mnuchin Gallery, where Jackson appeared alongside four of her male peers: Sam Gilliam, David Hammons, Al Loving, and Joe Overstreet. “I was so happy about that show because I was with the big guys,” she said.

Meanwhile, Jackson kept making new work. “I was in here, jamming like crazy,” she told me during a recent visit to her studio. At age 76, she paid off her mortgage and, finally, her student loans. Her first institutional exhibition in Europe—at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan—opens in September. At a time when painters are thinking expansively about the future of their medium, Jackson stands as a model. As Glenn Adamson wrote not long ago in Art in America, “Jackson feels at once like an elder stateswoman and … a new arrival on the scene.”

AROUND THE TIME OF HER MUSEUM SHOW in Savannah in 2019, Jackson finished one of her most ambitious pieces to date, Saudades, which has not one but three hanging parts. The title is a Portuguese word that refers to a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia. To make the work, Jackson incorporated fabric from one of her son’s T-shirts and one of her father’s ties, as well as the metal tops of the 1930s-era barrels her mother used throughout her life to move her pots and pans to a new house.

For a show last year at the Arts Club of Chicago, she added another element to Saudades, a section of acrylic painted a shade of green that she repurposed from a group of works she had made for a show in Glasgow. The new component represents a cat her son gave her in 2010 that had recently died. “I can still see him standing there,” she told me, gesturing toward the door of the kitchen, “holding that cat.”

In 1990, Jackson suffered a loss of another kind entirely when she was finishing graduate school at Yale: boxes upon boxes of artworks, clothing, antiques, and books (including her son’s baby book) that she had kept in a storage locker; she had to let it all be auctioned off when she failed to pay a month’s rent. The man at the storage space brought one box of books back to her, old paperbacks from the ’60s and ’70s—Siddhartha, Franny and Zooey— that she keeps on a special shelf in her office today. Jackson remembers the storage guy telling her, “Yours was a primo auction,” in reference her other possessions; they included a tiny Peter Voulkos ceramic she had made into a necklace, and an elaborate costume she wore when she danced striptease briefly to make money while running Gallery 32. The man who designed the costume had worked on the vaudeville circuit and knew how to craft stage wear that gave the persuasive illusion a performer was paring down to nothing. “It had all these parts that you take off or that fall apart,” Jackson said. “Striptease really is an art.”

Jackson remembers the experience of Gallery 32 as a struggle that made striptease necessary. She once organized an exhibition of art by a mailman. “Everybody in the city showed up, because of him being a mailman making art,” she recalled. “I had to go work at the club. I thought, Wait a minute—I’m having to go out dancing in clubs in order to keep this space open, for other artists. Nobody’s helping me. I didn’t have any money. I was doing it on my own.”

JACKSON WAS BORN IN ST. LOUIS in 1944, and her family moved to San Francisco when she was nine months old. Her father was lightskinned, and easily mistaken for Italian or Mexican, which gave him a certain measure of entrée (he joined the fraternal order of Masons, where he rose to the highest rank), and afforded him opportunities, like driving a cable car. Her mother was a seamstress.

When Jackson was 16, her father gave her a set of oil paints. By then, the family was living in Fairbanks, Alaska, where her father worked on the railroad. Pre-statehood Alaska was a wild place, full of people with checkered histories who went there to hide out. The small population was a mix of races and nationalities. Canadian Mounties rode their horses along the Yukon River. Kids skied at the hot springs near the Arctic Circle. As part of the 4-H youth development program, Jackson traveled to an annual conference in Chicago. Jet magazine took a photo: she was the first Black girl ever to attend.

After finishing college in San Francisco and touring South America with a ballet company, Jackson moved to Los Angeles. But the only good ballet company there was in Beverly Hills, too far a ride on the bus. It was easier to make art, so she started studying with celebrated Black figurative painter Charles White, and persuaded a rental agent to let her take space in the Granada Buildings, allegedly for use as a gallery (artists’ studios were somewhat suspect at the time). Two good friends, David Hammons and Dan Cocholar—“they called us the Three Musketeers,” Jackson said— encouraged her to open a gallery. So she did, and starting in 1968, ran Gallery 32 in her own unique way. “I remember she had her own style,” Betye Saar later wrote in an essay, “and she drove a hearse.”

She closed the gallery months before giving birth to Rafiki, an event that led to a creative spurt. She started making a lot of paintings, and signed with Ankrum Gallery in LA. With their exquisite washy images of animals and figures, Jackson’s paintings can seem jarring against the backdrop of that era’s political unrest. When she moved to LA, just after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, she felt little connection to the riots there. In Alaska, as she remembers, racism wasn’t much of an issue, and San Francisco was political in a less heated way. “I wanted to paint beauty,” Jackson said, “even though that was a dirty word.” Some reviews from the time read as if they’re almost relieved by the lack of political content. “As comments on her own blackness, [the works] are remarkable for their lack of bitterness and protest,” reads one from the Los Angeles Times in 1972.

Jackson was ambitious, and it paid off. A 1974 spread in Essence magazine featured her on a divan wearing a ruffled rayon wrap dress, and named Bill Cosby and Cannonball Adderley among those who were buying her work. Vincent Price bought a piece. She took a commission from Sonny Bono. One of her paintings appeared in the 1977 movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar, gracing the walls in a scene with Diane Keaton and Tuesday Weld.

In the early ’80s, Jackson moved 100 miles southeast, from LA to Idyllwild, in the San Jacinto Mountains, where she taught at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts until 1985; her studio was smaller, and her work followed suit. In 1987 she relocated again: to New Haven, to attend grad school for set design at the Yale School of Drama. “Connecticut was the first time [I] ever experienced people crossing to the other side of the street when they saw you coming,” Jackson said of the racism she experienced there. Although she was 44 and already an accomplished artist, she said she always had the sense there were people who thought she was an affirmativeaction admission.

After graduation, she spent six years as a freelance set designer. Back in the Bay Area, she also secured a studio in the Oakland Cannery building, which artists had been occupying since Abstract-Expressionist painter Arthur Monroe started living there in the ’70s. In 1994, seeking stability, she gave it up and accepted a faculty position at Saint Mary’s College of Maryland, teaching set design. A job offer came in 1996 from the Savannah College of Art and Design; unhappy at Saint Mary’s, and, remembering a good experience in an exhibition at SCAD in 1981, when the school first opened, she accepted.

IN SAVANNAH, JACKSON MOVED into an apartment with a spiral stairwell and a picturesque view of Forsyth Park. “It was just beautiful in Savannah. I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” she said. Her mother soon joined her from New Haven, where she’d followed Jackson from San Francisco. The apartment wasn’t big enough for the two of them, so Jackson found a rambling Greek-style double house built in 1890, in the Metropolitan District. There, she could live and work comfortably. “This was the 15th studio I’d had in my life,” she said. “I decided I was going to stay for 30 years.”

The classes she taught occupied her afternoons and evenings, so she’d get up at 5am to paint. It was in Savannah, Jackson says, that she “really started painting.” The light reminded her of the light in Los Angeles: long and sustaining. She’d brought some canvases with her from Maryland, figurative works, and she thought she would continue in that vein. She would sit in Forsyth Park and watch people walk from the east side to the west, paying most attention to older Black people, wondering what they were thinking, what it must have been like to be in Savannah during the Civil Rights movement and “segregation, which I never really had to go through.”

She started experimenting with abstraction and “playing with paint.” When talking about her studio practice, she still often uses phrases like “fooling around” or “misbehaving”; back then, she figured, no one was paying attention to her art anyway, so she decided to have some fun. She stopped working on stretched canvas and started experimenting with acrylics, with which she had been working since the 1960s, when they first became available. As she told members of a panel in Chicago last year, she “went through the good, bad, and evil of acrylic.”

Jackson stopped teaching in 2009. In the art market boom leading up to the recession beginning the year before, her students seemed to be getting wrapped up in the wrong things, their motivation shifting more to money and fame. Her own work was evolving, and now she was able to fully focus on it. Works she had made on Bogus paper, a strong recycled paper that she’d discovered during her set design years, and that she started layering in wrinkled scraps, had started to bend away from the wall, which she encouraged. She started pushing things further: maybe the acrylic could hold up on its own, and the paintings could achieve a kind of transparency, allowing light to flow through them. Her eureka moment came when she realized she could pour a puddle of acrylic medium on a plastic-lined worktable, shape it, let it dry, and then hang it from the studio ceiling—just as she had rigged sets as a scenographer.

Hanging the paintings allows her to paint both sides and apply what she describes as “old-fashioned painterly qualities.” One work with large brown brushstrokes features what she called “big chocolate slabs of acrylic.” That her paintings are two-for-ones is not unrelated to Jackson’s ecological outlook: if you send something out into a dying world, you might as well get the most out of it.

Throughout her life, she has invested in the natural world: she had her backyard in Savannah registered as a wildlife refuge. She made it lush as a jungle, nurturing saplings into tall trees and cultivating fruits and flowers. There are peaches and pomegranates, and muscadine grapes growing among Cherokee roses on a trellis. Nature has always set a high bar for her art: in 1973 she wrote to her dealer, Joan Ankrum, about some tropical birds, whose “colors were fantastically bright and like nothing that I will ever be able to bring out of a jar of paint.”

Living in Savannah Lowcountry—marked by estuaries, salt marshes, sandy beaches, and the wildlife that depend on them—made her more attentive to how paint can affect the environment, especially when her studio sink got stopped up and she watched a plumber scrape acrylic from the drainpipes. She didn’t want her leftover paint destroying the earth, so she incorporated a peeling stage into her practice, scraping dried acrylic just as the plumber did, from palette knives and jars, and upcycling scraps back into her paintings. “When I grew up in Alaska, you used everything,” Jackson said.

While the ecology of the South has seeped into her paintings, so too has the region’s painful past. “I’ve learned so many things since I’ve been in the South,” she told me. “There are horrible stories of how people were treated here.” Her 2017 painting Crossing Ebenezer features red produce sacks suspended in clear acrylic that reference the hundreds of newly emancipated slaves who drowned while crossing Savannah’s Ebenezer Creek in 1864. Hanging in the studio when I visited was the nearly 10-foot-tall columnar work A Hole in the Marker—Mary Turner 1918 (2020); the title references a woman who in 1918 was lynched while pregnant. Its owner is collector Pamela Joyner, and it was back with Jackson for a conservation check. The painting is gold, with a dark blue circle near the top; Jackson painted out the original figure in it. Curtain lace is enmeshed in the paint, and, in a haunting coincidence, after completing the painting, Jackson learned that Harlem Renaissance artist Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller also commemorated the incident not long after it happened—also in gold paint.

These days, Jackson doesn’t enjoy living in Savannah so much. Her neighborhood, now gentrified, has become a tourist attraction. Just across the street, what used to be a pleasant grassy passage is now a fenced-in area with food trucks and games (you need a credit card to enter) and a microbrewery in an old house from 1910. She likes the couple who run the brewery: they made a special brew, the Miss Suzanne, for her Jepson Center show. But she no longer enjoys hanging out on her porch the way she used to.

She thinks about relocating, maybe in five years—when she reaches the end of the 30 years she vowed to stay. Until then, she will contend with her house and her property, which she calls her “island of trees.” Since her art started selling again, she’s been putting money into a foundation, and hopes to turn the house into an artist residency. Her next step is to try to get the house on the National Register of Historic Places, after she found the remnants of a disused 19th-century rail line in her yard that once led from downtown out to Tybee Island.

There are also more immediate concerns. When I visited in June, there had just been a cold snap, and the plants needed some love. As for her artwork, which, at age 79, she continues to push and prod, Jackson said, “it’s always a mystery, going into the studio. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s different every time. Right now, I think I’m in another transition.”

It may still be summer, but the major auction houses already have their sights on November’s biannual evening sales. The biggest estate in play at the moment is that of longtime Whitney trustee and art collector Emily Fisher Landau.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s are going head-to-head for the artworks amassed by Fisher Landau, who died this past March at age 102, according to numerous dealers and advisors with knowledge of the negotiations. (She is survived by her daughter, Candia, who is also a collector and philanthropist.) The collection could rake in between $375 million and $500 million, several dealers told ARTnews, with the star being Picasso’s Femme à la montre (Woman with a Watch), a painting nearly five feet tall from 1932, considered by many to have been a pivotal year in the Spanish painter’s practice. In 2018, the Tate Modern even held an exhibition centered on Picasso’s work that year. In 1932 he also painted Nu au plateau de sculpteur (Nude, Green Leaves and Bust), which sold for $106 million at Christie’s New York in 2010, at the time a record for any work sold at auction. Femme à la montre could end up beating the current record for Picasso: $179 million for his 1955 harem scene, Les Femmes d’Alger (Version “O”), at Christie’s New York in 2015.

A painting like the Fisher Landau Picasso “will hopefully demonstrate that the market has not come down” over the past few months, dealer Brett Gorvy told ARTnews. Gorvy was cohead of Christie’s contemporary art department when both Nude, Green Leaves and Bust and Femmes d’Alger sold (he ended up in a bidding war on the latter artwork with fellow Christie’s specialist Loic Gouzer). Meanwhile, an art adviser who asked to remain anonymous told ARTnews that the Picasso could reinvigorate the market after wobbly sales in May, when the Gerald Fineberg collection, up for sale at Christie’s New York, didn’t quite reach expectations and featured lowered reserve prices.

Despite the lackluster Fineberg results, Christie’s has something going for it in the battle for the Fisher Landau collection: the house holds the current auction records for Picasso and Ed Ruscha. In 2019 Christie’s sold a 1964 Ruscha text painting, Hurting the Word Radio #2, for $52.5 million. The Fisher Landau collection has a similar text painting from the same year, Securing the Last Letter, which shows the word “BOSS” in all caps, with a vise gripping the final S.

Sotheby’s, meanwhile, holds the record for Cy Twombly, $70.5 million for a 1968 chalkboard painting—but only by a smidge: Christie’s sold a 1970 chalkboard work in 2014 for $69.6 million. The Fisher Landau holdings contain at least one stellar Twombly, an 8-foot-wide painting that the artist started in 1964 and revised in 1984.

Fisher Landau started collecting art in the early 1970s, after a well-publicized burglary of her jewelry collection brought a hefty insurance payout. She went on to amass some 1,500 works, including pieces by Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Andy Warhol, who painted her portrait. Selections from the collection were shown last year at the Norton Museum in Palm Beach, where Fisher Landau had a home. The Picasso, which had been on loan to Miami’s Perez Art Museum in 2018, hung front and center.

In 1991 the collector opened the Fisher Landau Center for Art in a 25,000-square-foot former parachute factory in Long Island City, Queens. It served as a home for her collection and a museum that was open to the public. The center closed to the public in November 2017.

Fisher Landau donated 367 works to the Whitney Museum in 2010, where for years she had been a trustee. The gift was estimated to be worth between $50 and $75 million, and features pivotal names in American art including Jasper Johns, William Eggleston, and Ruscha. The gift also gave a glimpse into the depth at which Fisher Landau collected: there were 14 works by Robert Rauschenberg from between 1950 and 1990, four by James Rosenquist, including the mural-size House of Fire II (1982), and an impressive 44 works by Johns.

Sotheby’s and Christie’s did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Now comes news that Malin Gallery, which opened in New York eight years ago, has shut its doors. Both its headquarters in New York’s Chelsea art district and an Aspen branch in Colorado are officially closed.

A former employee with knowledge of the gallery’s finances said that as of this past May, Malin owed money to multiple vendors, including a shipper and a caterer, and to artists who showed there. Reached by email, Barry T. Malin, the gallery’s founder and owner, denied this saying, “We do not not owe any money to them. In fact, they owe money to us.”

Jesse Krimes, an artist who showed with Malin, left the gallery earlier this month to join Jack Shainman Gallery.

One artist who asked not to be named and who is currently owed in excess of $9,000 said attempts to get paid over the last three months have involved a wire transfer that did not go through and a bounced check. Malin said that the wire transfer issue was due to a notice of possible fraud and that he did not recall a bounced check.

“Due to a series of unfortunate and unforeseen events, I regret to inform you that Malin Gallery is winding down and I will no longer represent individual artists,” Barry T. Malin wrote in an email to artists that was reviewed by ARTnews.

“We have engaged a consulting firm to help us with the gallery’s closure,” he wrote. “They are handling accounts payable during this process, and I have instructed them that prompt payment of any outstanding balances to artists is the priority. There are a few artworks in the gallery. In those cases, I will be in contact with you to set up direct return to you according to your preferences.”

Malin opened a gallery in Aspen in 2021 when a spate of New York galleries opened pop-ups there. Unlike the others, he returned in 2022. This past February, he announced plans to make that space permanent, however from June 29 to July 29, the space was occupied by a popup for LA-based fashion company Peri.A. The space is currently vacant.

Malin Gallery opened as Burning in Water on 10th Avenue in Chelsea in 2015 and has shown artists such as Borinquen Gallo, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Elizabeth Catlett, and Serge Attukwei Clottey. In 2018 the gallery expanded to two more spaces in Chelsea, at 507 West 27th Street.

In recent years the gallery became known for showing Krimes, a formerly incarcerated artist who was a breakout stars of Nicole Fleetwood’s MoMA PS1 exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” which also included Malin-represented artist Russell Craig. The gallery’s most recent shows, solo exhibitions for Angela China and Foad Satterfield in New York and Aspen, respectively, both closed in May.

As told to A.i.A. The “history” in history drawing is the history of making the drawing. Over the three years I was working on it—it’s a big drawing—the whole process just happens from day to day: you’re adding something new, building it, working through composition and how elements come into the spaces in different ways. Each time you come back to work on it, something new has happened in your life. 

For me, drawing is easy. I love it. It’s a calming therapy, a spiritual connection. I was really having a good time drawing this. You sometimes hear people say, “Oh, people who make abstract paintings do it because they can’t draw.” I think the opposite is true: for people who can draw, drawing is an easy thing—it’s something traditional and expected. People expect realism, and they enjoy it, because it’s the pleasure of seeing something recognizable. But every element in this drawing is an abstraction, even the things that are supposedly recognizable. I always play with things a little bit, stretch them and have fun with them. That’s just what the hand does. This piece is a little bumpy; it is not supposed to sit flat on the wall. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve let go of perfection. Ever since I left art school, it’s been about adjusting the rules of art, taking the fundamentals and stretching them into something more exciting. Finding another kind of beauty.

My body was going through a lot of changes, becoming fuller, and I was thinking about how a woman’s body becomes “out of shape,” but is also very powerful, and aggressive. It really had to do with women pushing through all this stuff that we have to do. But then also how women get taken for granted: we are not supposed to have knowledge, or power, or intelligence. Or take risks, do things that are new or innovative. I was also thinking about women having been medics, herbalists, the ones who brought babies into the world, and how that was taken away from us by modern medicine, which doesn’t have a clue about our bodies. 

I was having such a good time [drawing the] animals and insects. I used to collect all these bugs and things that would fall on the ground or come into the studio. I think about the big palmetto bugs that I first saw in 1966 when I was in Venezuela on tour with a dance troupe, staying in the Guadalajara Hilton—we called it the Guadala-Hilton. When I moved to Savannah, I saw palmetto bugs again. They still fascinate me. The cats won’t eat them because they are so nasty. 

There are parts of environments sneaking in: a little oasis of palm trees and some roots of something else. The cat is based on one of my kitties. And there is a polar bear just above the larger head—you have to look for it. There are birds. There is so much in this earth environment that we still don’t know. So much of nature is disappearing. I think I was putting as many disappearing things as I could into this drawing. I’m still fascinated by nature, like when I was a child and would walk through a garden and everything was bigger than me. I still love that idea.