Gallery Spotlight Archives

Gallery Spotlight: Antenna Gallery

During the summer of 2005, New Orleans resident Anne Gisleson and her friends were in the midst of developing Intersection New Orleans, a collaboration that encouraged 25 pairs of artists and writers to find inspiration in 25 intersections throughout the city. After Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city, Gisleson and her friends were determined to regroup and continue providing a cultural refuge for locals.

“It was just kind of an imperative need to start doing things after the storm, because nothing was happening culturally, for obvious reasons,” Gisleson says.

The informal art shows and literary events that the group hosted in the months after the storm led to the formation of Press-Street later that year. In 2008, Gisleson and her partners opened Antenna, a gallery space on St. Claude Street in the city’s Upper Ninth Ward. Their intent with Antenna was to create a place that would support and inspire the local creative community by focusing on cutting-edge contemporary art.

“It’s a space where the commercial end is taken out of the equation,” Gisleson says. “It’s a space where people can do the sort of projects that they wouldn’t be able to do in a for-profit gallery, which tends to be a bit safer and market oriented.”

Gallery Spotlight: Extra Extra

When Dan Wallace, Derek Frech, and Joe Lacina started Extra Extra in 2009, they had relocated to Philadelphia and were discovering the city’s growing art scene. The three initially met at the Maryland Institute College of Art and planned to eventually open an art space.

“Initially, a lot of people were interested [in starting a space], but then it just dwindled down to the few that were actually devoted to it,” Wallace says. “So we moved to Philadelphia with the intention of starting a space.”

Extra Extra is one of a handful of artist-run spaces in Philadelphia. Wallace, Frech, and Lacina wanted the space to provide a platform that would allow artists to create work that could challenge the traditional notions of what art, an artist, or a gallery could be.

Gallery Spotlight: Tenderpixel

Etan Ilfeld started Tenderpixel Gallery, located in Central London, in a rather spontaneous fashion back in 2007. After obtaining a master’s degree in film studies, Ilfeld decided to relocate from Southern California to London to pursue a second master’s in interactive media from Goldsmiths, University of London. He felt that Tenderpixel would be a perfect reason to stay in London and become more acquainted with the city’s contemporary art scene.

“My landlord had a vacant store, which I thought I could experiment with and provide as a platform for some of the artists that I met at Goldsmiths,” Ilfeld says. “I initially had no idea how it would all develop, and it just grew organically.”

Tenderpixel is a tiny space (less than 65 square feet) that acts as a creative incubator for artists. Many of the artists that are invited to exhibit usually showcase work that is highly conceptualized.

Gallery Spotlight: LMAKprojects

In 2005, art curator Louky Keijsers Koning created LMAKprojects in New York City in order to give emerging international artists a space where they could develop professionally while building connections with new audiences. LMAK — an abbreviation of Louky’s full name, Louky Marie Antoinette Keijsers — consisted of a main gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea District as well as a supplementary project space in Williamsburg. The dual-space setup allowed LMAKprojects to simultaneously create innovative and engaging art shows while building a solid reputation within New York’s mainstream art scene.

In 2009, Louky’s husband and fellow art curator Bart Keijsers Koning began focusing on LMAK full time. That same year, the couple decided to relocate its gallery and project space to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, an area that was receptive to its intent of engaging audiences with thought-provoking conceptual art.

“The nice thing that the Lower East Side is doing is drawing crowds that are very serious about art and what to engage, and [they] really look,” Bart says.

Gallery Spotlight: Elsewhere Collaborative

From 1939 to 1997, Sylvia Gray operated a multi-level thrift store in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. Throughout her life, the building housed eccentric collections of fabric, household goods, toys, and other bric-a-brac; eventually, the inventory came to resemble a hoard of tastes and memories, amassed into a fractured narrative.

The building came into the hands of Ms. Gray’s grandson, George Sheer, in 2003. Along with the help of collaborator Stephanie Sherman, the former thrift store emerged as Elsewhere Collaborative — a living museum and experimental arts platform.

Current Gallery: Alphabet exhibit (photo by Eileen Wold)

Gallery Spotlight: Current Gallery

Originally formed by 14 Baltimore artists as a short-term artist cooperative, Current Gallery is now in its second home and is currently functioning as a non-profit gallery and artist studio. The space came to life in 2004, after the initial group of young artists received a grant from the city of Baltimore for a proposal to productively utilize an unoccupied downtown building.

Gallery Spotlight: Chicago Urban Art Society

For the past 40 years, artists in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood have been slowly transforming a four-block stretch of Halsted Street into a quiet creative enclave. Even though the area has established a solid presence within Chicago’s art scene, it’s sometimes seen as a separate entity that doesn’t always engage with the rest of Pilsen’s predominantly Hispanic, working-class community. However, since opening in May of 2010, the Chicago Urban Art Society (CUAS) has made it a point to bridge this gap.

Gallery Spotlight: Gallery Hijinks

The Mission District in San Francisco has been a relentless spotlight for arts and culture since the 1970s. Initially home to various Latino populations, the neighborhood has featured vibrant murals to express its residents’ social, political, and community concerns.

During the past 20 years, the area has attracted aspiring young people of various ethnicities due to its relatively low cost of living. More recently, the Mission District has grown into a progressive independent arts district. Although the area continues to boast its unyielding street art, it also has become home to an array of creative businesses and alternative art spaces. One of these businesses is Gallery Hijinks.

Gallery Spotlight: Factory Fresh

Ad Deville and Ali Ha, the co-owners of Factory Fresh Gallery, are considered venerable street artists operating as Skewville and Pufferella, respectively. Yet they didn’t quite realize how to define their work until attending a Wooster Collective art walk along New York’s Lower East Side in 2002. During the event, some attendees inquired whether they were street artists, to which Deville responded, “Well, I put sneakers on wires, and it’s in the street.”

As Skewville and Pufferella, Deville quietly strung sneaker-shaped wooden blocks along the telephone wires of New York and other international cities while Ha delved into her fascination of creating plush fabric images. But the cohesive street-art community that was quickly taking shape along the Lower East Side intrigued them. They introduced their new friends to Orchard Street Gallery, which the couple opened in late 2002. Deville and Ha began collaborating with other contemporary art galleries and featuring shows by Gore B, Meeka, and Jet + Rubble.

Gallery Spotlight: Odessa

An interactive and progressive gallery space in Memphis, Tennessee, Odessa is slowly gaining attention as a unique underground arts and music space in the South. It’s situated in the Broad Avenue Arts District of the Binghamton community in Memphis, a neighborhood that originally was on the railway line between Tennessee and North Carolina. Eventually, the suburban area was annexed by the city of Memphis. Although the neighborhood remains underdeveloped, it boasts a strong sense of community and is gradually emerging as an important addition to the city’s aspiring arts scene.

Gallery Spotlight: Cinders Gallery

Steep rent increases within Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood forced the independent Cinders Gallery to find a new home – and fast. The cooperatively run space on Havemeyer Street was recently informed that its rent would increase an astounding $1,000 this January. But those familiar with the neighborhood know that rent in Williamsburg – as well as other less-hyped areas of Brooklyn – has been skyrocketing non-stop for the past decade.

Gallery Spotlight: Shooting Gallery

For Justin Giarla, owner of San Francisco’s Shooting Gallery, opening up an art space in a once-dicey neighborhood was inevitable — especially considering that his captivation with the West Coast’s lowbrow scene started when he was in high school.

“I really got hooked on art, and I would cut history, math, and English to go to my other art classes and stay there all day long,” Giarla says. “After a while, my teachers figured it out, but they never really did anything or said anything because they were just kind of like, ‘Well, at least he’s still in school.'”