Galleries owned and operated by artists have a rich history in New York as an alternative to the mainstream. They are now as important as ever.
"In fact, some regard artist-run galleries as risky themselves, their proprietors too creative to be practical. “It’s trash,” Chuke tells me of this belief. That reaction is shared by Eric Hibit, a co-director of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery in Gowanus; “as if we were in a constant fugue state of emotional turmoil,” he says with a sigh, rolling his eyes. Ortega y Gasset Projects started in 2013 in Bushwick and is now collectively run as a nonprofit by eight artists of diverse backgrounds. Indeed, inclusion is something they all stress to me as central to how they understand their mission as an artist-run gallery; curation, they explain, gives them a chance to bring more voices into the art world. When I’m there in June, work by Angélica Maria Millán Lozano, a female artist from Colombia, and Aika Akhmetova, a nonbinary artist from Kazakhstan, are being exhibited. The gallery operates on a 60-40 artist-gallery split, but some artists who sell nothing are given an honorarium, which allows, explains the co-director Leeza Meksin, Ortega y Gasset to take risks, to show “installations, site-specific work” and — something all the artists nod at — “artists who do not already have a market.” That the curators, as artists, get it is fundamental, they feel, to establishing trust. The co-director Zahar Vaks recalls one night he stayed up until 3 a.m. helping an artist with an installation. “Artist to artist,” he remembers saying, “this video is going to get up there.” "
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