Despite a Wave of Closures in New York, Small Galleries Here Are Flourishing

Recently, it has been heartening to open SeeSaw, the app that lists exhibition openings in multiple art hubs, and regularly discover tiny New York galleries I’ve never even heard of. These days, you’d expect there to be fewer listings there, not more. Gallery closures have become a fixture of the art press here, with JTT, Queer Thoughts, David Lewis, and many others shuttering in the past few years. All these galleries have two things in common: they were small, they shaped the New York art scene of the 2010s, and they took big risks, something few others here were willing to do, then or now.

But as these spaces have disappeared, new ones seem to be taking up their mantle. A range of tiny galleries have opened in Downtown New York since the onset of Covid, filling basement spaces, dingy storefronts, and one-room units in office buildings. It feels like an experimental spirit has finally begun to return to a city whose scene has felt overly safe as of late, as though everyone were running out of steam as they attempt to meet the demands of the market.

Artists, as usual, are the people to thank. Seeking an alternative to sleek white cubes and expensive real estate, some have opened micro-spaces in the unlikeliest of places. Jared Madere is among the creators of Yeche Lange, a venturesome space in the southernmost stretch of Broadway, in the Financial District, and Noah Barker operates Empire, a Midtown gallery whose name derives from the space’s proximity to the Empire State Building. Damien H. Ding opened his gallery, D.D.D.D., on Canal Street in 2022, and has even since expanded it internationally, last year launching a project space for video art in Singapore.

There are, of course, many New York galleries that are centrally located, on the Lower East Side and in Chinatown, which are already host to many commercial art spaces. Yet even here, smaller galleries are sprouting up in areas off the beaten path. Often, the only ways to learn of them are through word of mouth or by accidentally stumbling across them. (In a recent Spike column, critic Travis Diehl recalled hearing of what he described as “an apartment gallery in New York with an ungoogleable name and/or no online presence.” Its founder declined to tell him more, saying they didn’t want press.)

Perhaps it’s slightly unfair, then, to start mapping this underground ecosystem of new mini-galleries, whose operators seem to pride themselves on quiet community-building. But it also seems unfair not to spotlight the good work these galleries are doing. Here are three standout presentations put on by these spaces.