In recent weeks, stories about the dire state of the art market have tended to obscure the fact that for many seasoned art dealers now is less a time to panic than one in which you sit down and figure out how to keep going. At a time when the headlines are dominated by galleries that are closing, others are making strategic moves, like relocating. One of those is Cristin Tierney, who has built her business on being small but serious, and who last week opened a brand new space in New York’s now-dominant art district, Tribeca. Hers is a wager not just on her gallery but on the idea that mid-sized, independent dealers can still matter.
On a late summer afternoon, Tierney was casually leaning on a ladder in the doorway of her new space, surprisingly smudge and dust free in her simple cotton black dress and comfortable grey sneakers as construction went on around her. It’s Tierney’s fourth buildout in the fifteen years she’s been an art dealer; she is moving from Tribeca from six years on the Bowery, near enough to count as downtown, but far enough away in New York terms to be an entirely different neighborhood. Unlike in her former space, Tierney now has ground-floor windows on a block where passersby actually look in. Fifteen—a sprawling group show marking the gallery’s 15th anniversary—is the first exhibition here.
Tierney has made a name for herself with exhibitions that skew cerebral and conceptual. Her inaugural exhibition in Tribeca, Fifteen, makes her case. It gathers more than thirty artists whose practices have shaped the gallery’s identity: Dread Scott, whose 2007 screenprint Imagine a World Without America decentered the U.S. on the world map; Mary Lucier and peter campus, pioneers of video; Judy Pfaff, and Shaun Leonardo, whose performances wrestle with race, masculinity, and power. MK Guth’s Reading Aloud will be performed at the opening and brunch receptions, with disguised “guests” suddenly reciting passages about Tribeca until the room becomes a chorus of overlapping narratives. Meanwhile, Tim Youd will spend weeks retyping Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, pounding the novel into near-obliteration in the same neighborhood that once served as McInerney’s muse. It is not the kind of exhibition designed to be Instagrammed to death or bought out opening night.
