With the Art Market in Flux, Some Galleries Art Closing; This One is On the Move
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.
All of this is supported, however, with the work Tierney does on the secondary market, a model she says is in the Castelli tradition, invoking the late Leo Castelli’s willingness to carry artists whose work was experimental, demanding, or unproven, and to subsidize them with secondary-market sales. (“The back room pays for the front room,” she told Artnet for an article about the “middle market squeeze” in 2016.) Her reputation in the secondary market was cemented through her work with the estate of Anita Reiner, the Washington collector whose holdings included a Basquiat that sold at Christie’s in 2014 for nearly $35 million. After that auction, Christie’s referred the estate to Tierney, who has since advised on hundreds of remaining works. Some have been placed in institutions like the Hirshhorn, the National Gallery, and the Phillips Collection; others have been sold privately, including pieces by El Anatsui, Marlene Dumas, Sterling Ruby, and Sean Scully.
“We’ve always taken the approach that we’re about careers, not canvases,” Tierney said of her front room program, lamenting how art fairs have come to dominate the perception collectors have of the market. “Fairs are about single sales,” she added, “but a gallery has to be about sustaining careers.” She favors smaller, focused fairs like the 31-booth Independent 20th Century where, last week, she did a solo show of Judy Pfaff’s work from the 80s and 90s as a curtain-raiser for her show of Pfaff at the gallery next month.
Tierney’s first art world job was with an auction house—she worked in the education department at Christie’s, where she found herself teaching would-be collectors including John and Barbara Vogelstein, and David Mugrabi, along with a tranche of lawyers, bankers, and doctors who wanted to learn how to see before they bought. Education, she realized, was a form of client development. “If you can shape their eye,” she said, “you can shape their collections.” That insight led her to start an advisory business, where she ran private seminars and guided acquisitions outside the auction houses.
In 2010, when she decided to open a gallery, Chelsea, then still the art world’s gravitational center, was the obvious choice. Her first exhibitions were devoted to video and ambitious installations: peter campus’s haunting videos and Alois Kronschlaeger’s inverted 69-foot mountain structure. “I know from minimum means you can achieve maximum effect,” Tierney said, recalling those early shows.
As Tierney recalls it, Chelsea back then was a place of camaraderie: Saturdays everyone gathered in the neighborhood, drifting in and out of each other’s openings, gossiping, arguing, and building relationships that felt essential. But that culture was already evaporating, being gradually replaced by the atomized, transactional rhythm of fairs and online sales. For Tierney, moving to Tribeca is partly about recapturing that sense of community.
Surviving as a mid-sized gallery in New York has always been precarious, but according to Tierney, despite the appearance of a booming market at times, the past fifteen years have been brutal. Rents climbed, mega-galleries grew ever larger, and the middle hollowed out. Tim Blum’s recent closure resonated with her because it confirmed what many dealers already knew: the system rewards the extremes and punishes everyone in between. To her, the closures are less about failure than fatigue: the treadmill of art fairs, the pressure to grow or die, the endless fight for attention in a shrinking media ecosystem—all of it has left even successful dealers burned out.
She has supported all of this with what a business major might call a diversified revenue stream: advisory work, secondary market sales, appraisals—hedges against a volatile market. A gallery, she said, cannot survive on one income source alone.
The move to Walker Street places Tierney alongside a generation of independent dealers—Bortolami, PPOW, Canada, Miguel Abreu—who have transformed the neighborhood into the city’s most dynamic district.
In the coming year, she plans a slate of solo, two-person, and group exhibitions designed to test every corner of the new space. Pfaff’s October solo will anchor the program, but the broader ambition is clear: more room for video, for performance, for large-scale work that refuses to fit the frame. Fifteen is the overture; the next act begins now.
Whatever the future brings, and despite what she’s doing on the secondary market, Tierney is set on keeping her front room challenging, and not jumping on the bandwagon. A dealer, she said, is “part salesman and part proselytizer. It’s easy to be artist-forward when paintings are selling.” The 80s and 90s pieces by Pfaff that she showed at Independent last week are Pfaff’s signature works, more of surer sell. But for the upcoming show, she told Pfaff, “do whatever you want.”
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