Latest / The Russi Hive / Elizabeth Dee: Who Gets Seen — Attention, Power, and Building Independent

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Elizabeth Dee: Who Gets Seen — Attention, Power, and Building Independent · The Russi Hive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Alejandro Rusi, and this is the Rusi How.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Conversations with people who treat their work and life as a creative practice.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Today, I sit down with Elizabeth Key, founder of the Independent Art Force.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about the architecture of attention, design thinking, floor plans as poetry, and the politics of visibility.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Emerging from a monastic phase of hand drawing, visitor choreography, how people move, pause, and look at art, she's rewriting independent with no playbook, just rigorous principles, risk tolerance, and uncompromising taste.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast is presented by Rico Moresca.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me, Elizabeth D, and welcome to the Rusey Hive Podcast.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: There always seems to be so much going on in your world, so um I'm really flattered that you made the time to come and sit with me today.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm delighted.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to be here.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Wonderful.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: So today I would love to explore the strategic creativity that goes into building platforms and contexts for art and how it reflects a kind of thinking that is in many ways radically different from the creative brain at work in other fields.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: So with that in mind, here's your hive card.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: System name E.dOS version 3.0 Public Build.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Creative Engine, Context Driven Cultural Strategy, Core Processes, Artist Advocacy, Institution Memory Hacking, Platform Design, Default Mode, High Resolution Attention, Power Source, Conviction, Research, Risk Tolance, Known Bug, Inpatience with Suficial Narratives, Latest Patch Notes, Expanded Focus from Galleries to Echo systems, rewrote rules around who gets seen and where.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that's your hype card.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because so much of your work is conceptual and structural, uh, the metaphor that made the most sense to me was an operating system information card.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: But nobody has written one of those.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Never.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: First time.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I'd love to get a copy of it.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'll get you a copy.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: So as I mentioned, uh creativity isn't just the artist's domain.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh dealers, curators, founders practice it quietly every day.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: What does creativity look like in your work these days?
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: What creativity looks to me like now is almost like I'm very much uh in an inward place at the moment.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'm spending a lot of time uh in kind of a kind of living a more monastic life.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm spending a lot of time alone uh with floor plans and uh proposals from galleries and thinking through the meaning of presentations and the meaning of how architecture works to support those presentations.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it's very intricate work, it's very rewarding work, but it's very deep work.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so sometimes creativity is is an expressive project for me, but in with art fairs which are so public, they often are more extroverted.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm in a phase right now where it's much more introverted.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: So before the fairs are fairs, you need that moment of like being with yourself and thinking everything through.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like I showed you, I think, before we started the uh floor plans.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and uh we spent four hours in the in Pier 36 today and literally hand drawing the uh the spatial design and the choreography of the visitor and how thinking about what art encounters need to look like now is uh is something that's very much on my mind.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: But then also how you support that with really rigorous, critically minded content for a well-informed art audience of contemporary art.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: And how do we stretch that or move that forward in ways that are interesting and surprising to people?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, when did you first recognize uh that you had the kind of intelligence that sees systems clearly and like the ability to spot blind spots, understand where a shift is possible, and sense when the timing is right to make a move?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's a really interesting question.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think that the fact that I have an artistic background and I was, you know, an art practitioner early on, uh, a lot of those things were probably more intuitive and less intellectualized.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, when I first started, I was a gallerist before I became uh founder of Independent.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so I I think I was working more from a real instinctive place uh on that front and learning uh through my own experiences, trial and error, trying to kind of put myself in as many uh creative ex uh creative spaces as possible to kind of understand where and test where my limits were.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: But there was a shift uh and a very important shift where it became more of an intellectual uh fascination about where gaps and systems and pathways happen within this process.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it I think after a certain time in my life and also maybe after sort of amassing a certain kind of experience level, I began to see it much more from a distanced view and more had more perspective on it.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: There were a few moments that shifted my thinking around that.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, one of them was reading uh Principles by Ray Dalio, which is like a really interesting book for anybody that wants to think about systematic project management within a creative structure to interpret uh what is happening in society, uh, and thinking about like radical transparency and meritocracies and how you bring, you know, because everything I do involves a huge amount of collaboration, collaboration with gallerists like you, collaboration with my team, other curators, institutions.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's so uh that's what's so wonderful about the project is that it's so it's so um complex in a good way around where the art system is.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: But I think in order to do that, you have to be highly organized and you have to have a real infrastructure and architecture to your work, which is why I love how you started the conversation.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: And the other thing I would say is working with Karen Rubino, who you may know, who's in our world, who is a strategic consultant who came into my life at a time where I was really ready to kind of think through more strategic work around what I was working on in the organization and with our with our team at large and how to optimize what we were doing in a way that was very effective from an organization and kind of pathway and process mapping and uh project planning structure.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I became very addicted to some of like working on a more principled approach.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: So now it sort of raised the bar of our work.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: So now we're in a place where the highest principles lead everything we do.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, therefore, the quality has to be there, the design has to be perfect.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: We don't make compromises circumstantially because we're in situations where we feel pressure.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: And uh this was very hard to get to, and we still have challenges to that, of course, like anyone, but I think that we set up an environment now where that everyone contributes to in our team, and our collaborators contribute to in the systems that we've been able to set up for them that support them and their work, where we can't all be a part of a more creative organism.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Going back to your gallery, uh your early program was unusually bold.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, performance, conceptual work, time-based projects, artists questioning identity, politics, institutions, and none of that was market safe in the late 90s, early 2000s.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: What was the through line for you and what were you looking for in artists at that stage that helped you define the gallery's identity?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, at the time, uh, you know, I started the gallery uh in a few iterations, I would say in the late 90s, and then I closed the gallery, retired from gallery practice in 2018.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: So there were a lot of chapters and stages.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: I came into the New York art world at a time where my generation was had a lot of opportunity.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um there was a renewed interest in emerging artists, a lot of galleries that were my peers were showing artists of their generation, so therefore young and emerging and rising artists' careers.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, I had artists in that category, but I stood apart from the pack, I think, because there are two things that really drive my interest in are one is philosophy, and the other is critical social thought.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: So theory, uh, conceptual-based practices.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that also lends itself to feminist and political theory, which I've been very involved in since I was, you know, at Mount Holyoke College in the 90s, uh, doing revisionist art history and and studying philosophy as well.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I I I wanted to bring my the fortune of having that academic background to my program.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: And this is at a time in the late 90s where figuration was really key.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: It was the moment of the Yale school rising, John Curran, Scavige.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: That was the dominant aesthetic.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and I know those artists, and I love those artists, and I respect them greatly.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: They were a generation older than me, but there was a lot of kind of trend chasing around art that was sort of in that mode.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: And this was not something that I was looking to.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: I was looking at Adrienne Piper.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I had worked on a lot of research of her work in college.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, everything that she stands for as an artist is of great, great deep interest to me.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so for me, that was the impetus.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was working in a in a different way.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there were other galleries working like that too that I felt a lot of resonance with that were not traditional gallery structures, like Orchard Gallery, for instance, which was really a community of uh artists and theorists and art historians who were really expanding the notion of what a gallery could be on the Lower East Side.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, there were it there were many opportunities to kind of think more creatively about the space of the gallery, but I've always been a little bit, you know, of a frustrated gallerist, and I think in a way, and I wanted to kind of uh chafe against the conformity of working generationally with artists and representing certain trends.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I could have been very successful doing that, but I chose a different path, and I'm so glad I did.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you've always operated with the understanding that showing art isn't just about the work itself, um, it's about shaping the conditions in which it is seen.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: This feels like the DNA that eventually led to independent.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Can you pinpoint the moment when that design mindset uh shifted from something you did inside the gallery to something that demanded its own larger structure?
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it's when I met Ryan Tricarton, um, who came into my gallery right as he was graduating from RISD and was making game-changing performance-based videos that were really foregrounding the future of social media at the time, at a time where social media was really a novel part of our technological existence.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: And uh when I met Ryan, I knew that he had he was so talented and had such a vision for the video, the kinds of new media projects he wanted to do that were really uh uncategorizable.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that I knew that taking him on as an artist would be obviously challenging from our market position, but as you said before, that was never my main concern.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but also challenging in terms of the gallery wasn't the right container for that work in every sense of the uh of the story, so I knew it would kind of be taking me beyond the gallery to work with him.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: I was I not only did I take him on as an artist, but I also uh co-produced, you know, his major works for 12 years.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: So all of his video works, it was really a co-production between the two of us.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: And most of those projects took m numerous years to realize.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: And once those projects realized, they they really belonged in major A-list institutions.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I was a big part of actually, I was the person making sure that we had institutional shows and travel schedules for the work that was going to be completed in a two years' time, three years' time.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: And the gallery just wasn't the right platform for the discourse that needed to happen.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, YouTube was a platform that needed to happen for Ryan at a time where YouTube meant something different than it means today.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Musee d'Art Modern was a place that meant something for the work and added something of value to the work.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: PS1, when Klaus, as Klaus Biesenbach's first show when he became director, was the right time.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, setting things up with Mocha in Los Angeles with Jeffrey Deitch as one of his first projects with a living artist was the right time.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: So doing a monograph that sort of brought these whole all of this work together in a larger format, this was this was really the kind of work where I knew I was sort of living, playing a role that was outside the gallerist.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that I could still do that in the position I was sitting in.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: And and it it was sort of, there was no playbook.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then I never really thought about those boundaries beyond that experience.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: So everything was sort of more open and fluid after that.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I appreciate you saying about creating the conditions for that work to happen because that's exactly what I always brought to every artist I worked with, you know, and yet with every gallery I work with too.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: What are the conditions to present this work to its full and best ability and potential?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and where can I actually contribute and be useful to that and and make some sort of contribution?
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: And for me, it's the conditions.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's not I'm a gallerist and I represent this person.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's just the starting point.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: So when the gallery and the fair overlapped and intersected, actually, because you participated in the independent audience.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I did.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: I did.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that must have created a unique kind of feedback loop.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: How did that dual position influence the way you thought about visibility, context, and the larger ecosystem you were helping shape?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think it helped me understand audience very well because it's not easy to be a gallerist that owns an art fair and be exhibiting in that art fair.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, part of the reason why we started independent was because there was a real frustration with the, you know, expo apex that we were participating in.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we were participating in the art bossels and um the friezes of the world, and they were just not places that our artists wanted to make work especially for.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: And rightfully so, because they don't provide an innovative context that artists are feel as aspirational.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: They're not shows, they're not curated.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the problem with them.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so everybody was sort of participating in them because they were at a certain place to be able to do that, but then also frustrated by the limitations of those environments.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, why don't we just create a different environment?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: But I also was representing Ryan at the time.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: We had a very hard time showing his work in those kinds of environments.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: They were extremely restrictive, like the gallery.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: They were just restrictive.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so being able to present some of Ryan's work at Independent was really important for me.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was a way for me to have discourse around the work.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that being said, collectors would come and started to associate the gallery with the fair and not on its own terms.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: Or there were people that I would encounter that would only see me as an art fair owner, which was never my goal in life, it was just circumstantial, or only see me as a gallerist and had a hard time seeing me in dual lights.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so therefore, I, you know, and gal art fairs are often founded by gallerists, you know, it's like actually a historical kind of you know, great tradition to be a part of.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, even Art Puzzle was founded by Ernst Beiler, the gallerist.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot of great tradition in that.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: But what every gallerist that starts an art fair will tell you is that they do the least well today, you know, because they're so if you're doing this with great intent, you don't have you want your peers to do better than you.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then you have people who are um collectors are starting to view you in different lights, and they can't often rectify the two.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you're not necessarily performing to the level of your peers at these things, which is not, which is fine.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: But it's it's not like this perfect situation where, oh, isn't it great?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: You get to show it your own art fair, you get to make money in two ways.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like, if only it were that simple, it's actually quite the opposite.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're dealing with perception and you're having to address how you're seen.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the more you can be in that space, the more effective you can be in communicating for your artists, for your other galleries at your fair, for your fair itself, for your gallery program itself.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: But ultimately I got to a place where I really did need to choose.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm really happy I made the choice to choose independent because I think it's been suit that I'm better suited to this work.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you know, you do it is impossible to continue forever uh having two active businesses that are so demanding in a good way of everything you have.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you have to give a thousand percent to either of these endeavors.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: So uh traditional affairs tend to compress the dealer's role into sales and speed.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: How did independent reimagine what a dealer could do inside the fair context?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm so glad you asked that question because gallers to me are the great, great, great thinkers of our time.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: They're bringing individual artist voices together in a program that they consider very carefully.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: And they become, by default, representing these artists in the in the most exclusive way possible, the experts on those that artist work over a period of decades and sometimes an entire lifetime.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that expertise and that curatorial rigor and insight is underserved in the traditional kind of expo apex uh market fair setting where you bring 12 works by 12 artists that happen to be recent to your inventory and you present them and say, This is my gallery.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: That is just a lost opportunity to highlight you as a gallerist, to highlight your thinking around these artists and their relationship to each other, to highlight the depth of knowledge you have in individual artists that you think are consequential to our time, and also in terms of putting forward a real proposition.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so that is something that I wanted to change and uh respond to and set up an environment for.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, sales are important.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing that I'm really proud of is our track record in sales at these fairs.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the emerging market, the middle of the cont of the middle of the market are the hardest areas to get right.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we have not only gotten that right, but we've exceeded our competitors, including some of the people I spoke about earlier, by miles in terms of new clients to the gallery that are become repeat patrons of the artist.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: That percentage level is just exceptional.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, we even had the highest price paid in set September of all the 10 fairs that were happening that week, we had the highest price.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: So we're also performing at the very top end uh within with the Kabakoff um sale that we had at Independent 20th Century in September, we see it at fairs that have hundreds of galleries.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: But our performance really speaks for itself.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I do believe that if you start with quality and curation and work with gallerists that are as much curators and brilliant minds as art dealers, and then you set up an environment for their presentations to go really deep in terms of their knowledge and expertise, the sales just take care of themselves.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: And the new clients show up and they participate.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: So as independent has become a permanent fixture in the annual fare cycle.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: How do you protect the integrity of its nominating um model?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Keep the curatorial bar exactly where you want it.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard, you know?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's uh it's a big part of why we made the the move to Pier 36, actually, because when we were at Spring Studios, the costs of that venue were so egregiously high that, of course, I would love to have the most risk-taking work that hasn't yet tested itself in the market there.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: But at the prices of which these fairs were costing, including ours, it felt like, you know, insulting to just assume that we should have extraordinary non-commercial positions and start and shape them there when the cost level, the barred entry was like going up and up and up.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: The move to Pier 36, I've always wanted to get into that building, but it was never available on the weeks that we needed to be aligned with all the other fairs.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: But when we had the change by one week because of the Vesbian Holly shift date, which was really exciting, that gave us an opportunity to get to grab that building finally.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it is half the price of what we um paid for spring.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: So we were able to pass all of that on to the galleries.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: So now it's it's more democratic space.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's not four floors where it's like this is the better floor or that's the better floor.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's really one complete platform, but it allows us to reset the pricing.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: So we're getting projects that are more risk-taking now because there is less of a financial um consequence.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to get back to that, particularly with living artists, because I think that's where gallerists should lean into in terms of rising artists and artists that have not yet reached their full potential.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: This is where I think the market A is more most active.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's where the next generation is coming in and looking.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's an opportunity for our clients that have been loyal to us for 17 years and bought their first Nicholas Party for$12,000 at Independent because it was the New York debut of the artist with Modern Institute, or bought their first, you know, um Oscar Merleau painting, you know, from modern art art and you know, before he had shown anywhere and anyone knew who he was for$10,000.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like our clients, our our collective collectors, are very, very um thankful that we gave them those opportunities and we brought those artists forward before anybody else knew who they were.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: And those collectors own those works today and are grateful for having that opportunity.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we want to continue to deliver that.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think working very closely with the galleries and being able to provide the economic realities that are needed to do that is a big part of our responsibility.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: So you've said that the definition of contemporary has become too rigid.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: When you stop treating it as a cutoff date and instead kind of as a cultural and aesthetic condition, what kinds of relationships between artists across time do you think that makes possible?
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think it's something that I just started to observe in our um May show where the contemporary show, the younger dealers that were coming up, were representing more states.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought that was wonderful.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they were showing that work.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, whether it was emancipated, you know, women artists from the 1970s or who were still making work today, or estates from the 60s and representing the families.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: It was really enlightening to me to see galleries that were under five or ten years in operation take on these sort of historical responsibilities.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then it was really interesting for me to see them bring those works to independent and succeed in sales.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: To me, that was just really great because if these are the kinds of projects that are somewhat untested with these younger galleries, and they're trying to kind of rehistoricize and create legacies for these artists that maybe have fallen out of favor or are less known, would be, you know, definitely invited by Art Basel or accepted accepted by Art Basel, but they would be placed in a special section in the corner on the second floor in a complete location desert.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: And you would go there and be like, wow, this is incredible.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: This artist from the 1970s, I never even knew this work was so pivotal to its moment.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's great time at Rehistorica.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: You'd be the only one there.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: All of it would be available, no one would be buying it, because they all be downstairs at, you know, a very well-established gallery, looking at very well-established art for very, very top prices, and everybody refocused on that.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: But when they brought that to independent, they would sell out, right?
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, we have something here that no one else has, which is we are broadening the notion of the contemporary to make it more fluid, just the way we did at the beginning when we first started, where we put artists who specialize, like Rika Moresco, who specialized in art cellular outsider art next to Gagosian, and they making an equivalence of that.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: That was important to us to do, to represent things in new contexts that people hadn't really people had overcategorized and positioned that was the in a false way or a way that was created false equivalencies.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we broke that through that.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: And now you go to art fairs all over the world, and they're everybody wants to have Rico Moresca in their fair.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: They're getting, you know, you guys are getting the uh the awards at the fairs, and you know, it's all in vogue.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: But like at the time, there were real lines that people were drawing that were not productive, that actually kept people from reaching their full potential.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think when I saw this shift going on with the estates by younger gallerists, and I saw how the bigger fairs that were more convention centery were treating it and failing, not for any intention.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: The intentions were good, but the six the success model was just a failure.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was not a success.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then our platform in our context being a perfect place where things were really changing for these for these artists and the gallery.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: I said, let's continue doing this.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it was something that happened organically, yeah, and it just felt like it needed to change.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: And we somehow were able to create that tipping point, and that's how 20th century actually started.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: So that brings me to 20th century independent, which um your second fair, and it was founded, you said five years.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we found it during the pandemic.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: We worked on this stuff.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it wasn't 2020, it was 2020, it was 2020.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: I guess I should clarify it because in 2021, when we were just starting to come out of the pandemic, um, I formed a focus group and I hired Sophie Scherlink, who was the global director of TEFOF for many years, to kind of join us to help me develop this notion of what could a what could a what what could a modern fair in New York look like that honored canonical artists but showed a different side of their work, and then also represented uh artists that should have been represented in the canon from the get-go.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: And probably were in some cases, but for whatever reason, today's version doesn't include them.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: And how do we include women?
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: How do we include marginalized communities?
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: How do we include the global south in all of this conversation?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because for me, that goes back to some of my roots in, you know, going back to my college years with Adrian, my work with Adrian Piper and um dating back to university, you know, thinking through all of that and bringing that forward.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: And also I was thinking from a Western perspective, how do we create non-Western narratives for the canon?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's what we need to think about.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: We can't have this Eurocentric viewpoint, but we have to keep doing the scholarship on those artists.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: But the scholarship has to be surprising, innovative, and new.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do we bring all that together?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I really wanted to work with Sophie on it, and we worked have worked so well together.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: We were great colleagues before.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then I brought in um to the mix uh Alma Luxemburg, who I've admired, her and her mother, um uh Daniela Luxemburg, I've really admired for many years about their way of looking at historical narratives and interpreting them with great, great curatorial excellence.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so I thought they would be important.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: Alma is also very next gen, so I wanted her generational viewpoint on this.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh Joan Namad, who has a phenomenal gallery, Namad Contemporary, and definitely thinks through how canonical artists like Picasso, which his uh family collection has been deeply involved with for multiple generations, dating back to the 1960s, how he being someone in his 30s can interpret those narratives differently and shed and make connections to living artists that are influenced by those artists today uh through their program.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so I thought, what a perfect kind of, I'm just delighted to be in the presence of Sophie, Joe, and Alma in a think tank situation during COVID where we can talk about all of these questions and say, what does it mean?
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: And how do we uh how do we kind of you know stake out new ground?
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it what you saw in 2022, which was our first edition, is independent 20th century, which is a direct result of these conversations and this thinking.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're dealing with artists who were overlooked in their own time, there's an element, there's a real element of stewardship um involved.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: How do you think about your responsibility both to the artist's history and to the present-day market encountering it now?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think about that a lot.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think for the platform has to be the commitment to the way in which things are seen, the way in which we focus on solo shows or avant-garde contexts and thematize the show around those narratives.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, there's a very high premium in that show on storytelling.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: And this is something that I think has yielded incredible success for the fair.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: And every year it just grows exponentially, the interest level.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I see more and more contemporary collectors who, you know, five years ago said, Oh, I'll come to your show, but I don't buy modern, who are like deeply buying modern and less contemporary.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: So there's really a behavioral shift going on that we sort of we're lucky to kind of coexist with that is also beneficial to us.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: But the other thing I think is lesser known about this project is the level of scholarship that we are involved in.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: We are commissioning art historians, particularly who are experts in non-American fields, non-Western fields, non-Eurocentric fields, to do the scholarship on artists in English that has never happened.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because what I have realized, particularly looking at Latin America and other territories, is that the problem with integrating those artist positions is the lack of a scholarship in English.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that and it exists in native language.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, translation, commissioning, you know, really important art historians to, you know, to write on that and making sure that gets translated, or getting English native speakers to write about that work, um, and then getting obviously press and PR around these artists in, you know, in the you know, we in New York where you are in the in the the center of the media capital of the world.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so making sure that that, you know, when when we had a New York Times review that talks about all the Brazilian artists that we showed one year and really highlights Brazil and the history of Brazil, I know we've done our job.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, that just feels really great.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: Or we get the front page of the New York Times featuring a story on one artist, uh, you know, it's really consequential to the whole legacy.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so those are the areas in which I really focus on a lot.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: So at this point, independent has become this whole architecture.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's the fairs, there's the editorial branch, which you just mentioned, there's the market research, um, there's uh the press outreach with the bureau.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: Taken together, it feels like a meta project.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: What's the cultural function of this larger structure?
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think that 20th century came out of a deep interest in mine that came organically from witnessing how dealers were addressing historical material and also me looking at the market and seeing where the opportunity was in modern bureau comes from my work in public relations and strategy around communication, and just seeing how the gap between where the PR firms live and where the galleries are, and seeing where I can play a useful role in supporting more diverse coverage across arts media for galleries in the shows they do in their galleries.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, um, so that's like kind of a problem-solving kind of project, and it's been very successful, and we're very excited to expand it this year to uh London and to Los Angeles.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: So that will be a really nice evolution for us next year.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: The independent features, which is the scholarship work that we do and the kind of self-commissioning that we do and the publishing work we do, is a passion of mine.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, we we do that actively across both fairs.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a way for us to expand and grow without being beholden to a capitalist idea of scale.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: I do believe in growth, but I believe in growth is about quality enrichment, it's not about footprint.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why we don't have fairs franchised in every other city.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: We've certainly had the opportunity to do that.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: We've tested that even with our independent Brussels a few years with our partnership with the city of Brussels.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: But ultimately, I think where we can be uh of use to uh to the galleries, to the artists, to the market, and to and to art history is in these areas that we can be very um useful in.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: But where it fits sits culturally, I really don't have a perspective on it.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I did.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: You're right in the middle of it, so maybe I think we're too close to it.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: Too close to it.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: And Bureau's, you know, moving into year two, our publishing is so connected to the shows, yes, that it's really not something that we really think about so much on the kind of larger scale.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: Just on the supporting kind of role.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: That makes sense.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we've spent so much time inside the things that you've built.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: But before we close, I want to zoom out to the person before all of that.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: Who was Elizabeth D.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: before the art world?
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, before the gallery, before independent, and what parts of that early self do you still recognize today?
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: Oh wow, that's deep.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: As I get older, I get more interested in where my roots are, uh, my family's roots are.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so my mother is from, both my parents are from the middle of the country, the rust belt, uh, even those who may know.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: My mother's side of the family is from Appalachian, Kentucky.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's a very particular cultural background that I share through my grandparents and my aunts and uncles, who all migrated um, you know, to southern Indiana and southern Ohio from there over the years.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: Some are still in in Kentucky, my more distant relatives.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: But that is a cultural identity that I don't think I thought about a lot when I was starting my career.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I think it is distinctive to me.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't see meet that many people who have that background, that working class background on my mother's side.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, my father's side, very much kind of the American dream, you know.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh small town America.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh my grandfather owned the local grocery store, the local hardware store, and uh in uh small town in Indiana.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I find I'm more drawn back to maybe it's because where we are politically at the moment, where there's such a divide between class in this country, between what's happening in the heartland and what's happening everywhere else.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: I have family members that are have been directly impacted by um NAFTA in the 90s, who are directly impacted by the loss of um successful independently owned farmland.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: I have family that's directly impacted by the terrace now uh in the factories.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um so what's going on politically, I think is affecting all of us, but I think I have a unique um sense of that.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's really helped me, giving me a really strong sense of uh heritage uh and kind of an American mindset that I can be, I think about a lot, uh, maybe more than most people.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're very lucky to live in New York City and to be somewhat with our tribe who are all trying to change the world and thinking about things and seeing the danger of where things are going in the world and can identify that with each other.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a really important part of who I am.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: But I think my family and their lived experience is becoming a more important part of my thinking.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that's sort of where my roots are.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: So when you think about the next generation of women entering the art world and other creative fields now, what do you hope they inherit from your generation and what do you hope they feel free to leave out?
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: I hope that they inherit the uh entrepreneurism of gallery work because the beauty beauty of being a gallerist is the freedom and the lack of a playbook.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that that was a huge creative opportunity that I feel so fortunate and grateful to have been um able to benefit by.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel that the professionalization of the art world has been really important, and there's been a lot of great things about that.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I myself am a proponent of a lot of system of systematic thinking, which we talked about.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: But I have been concerned that the kind of cost to do this now has created a certain conservatism in how people work for galleries, you know, in terms of very established galleries that are kind of in their own kind of uh multinational corporational um corporation culture.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: And that I think there are a lot of talented people that went in to work for the big galleries and they disappeared.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't see their voice in the program, we don't see their voice in the shows, we don't know which artists they've selected, which artists they're working with.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's a completely anonymous kind of space.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that there's great people contributing great work there.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: I just like to see it.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, and I understand the security that that provides in an environment that is less uh safe economically for women, particularly who have to think about their bottom line all the time.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'd like to see, and I think I am seeing it, and this is very exciting, a return to starting a single-owner small business like a gallery and doing it from a truly creative and curatorial position and not worrying about the things that I think galleries spend a lot of time wasting their time worrying about.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like, am I fitting in?
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: Am I getting accepted to the right things?
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Am I getting the right collectors?
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: Am I like this stuff is, you know, I'm not discounting its importance, but I I definitely think it's been the dominant conversation, and I don't think we benefited from the program and the shows.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd like to see more radicalization in the gallery space by women because I think women were always the ones pushing the envelope and innovating.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: So looking ahead, what still feels genuinely exciting and urgent to you?
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not in terms of scale or ambition, but just in terms of curiosity.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: I definitely want to understand where people are psychologically and emotionally now in terms of art making.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: This year we're gonna see in the fair a lot of what we call we're just terming it j more generally emotional spaces.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that we there's a lot of um subtexts happening in visual culture right now that's based on lived psychological experience and the sense of self and how that relates.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: To people's identification with ideas versus their own personal psychological profile.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: And this is something that deeply interests me.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm breaking out in many ways with the fair.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: You'll see it many dominant themes around that.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: Globally, I'm also really interested in what's happening in Asia with Asian artists who can't express themselves freely in their home countries and are living here and elsewhere doing that.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we have a lot of that represented in the May Fair.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: And some of that work is political with a with a very subversive subtext.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: So we're seeing a lot of that.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that I want to unpack.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: There are a lot of uh cultural reference points being made there to the history of visual culture in China.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm doing a lot of research on that because that's an area of interest of mine personally, too.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's I mean, there's always so much to be curious about and excited about and inspired by.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: But that's what's driving me lately.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Elizabeth, I think we did it.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: It was so much fun.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: Congratulations on your podcast.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm happy to be to be part of it.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: If this conversation resonated with you, follow the show wherever you listen and find me on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack at RucyHive.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_00: If someone came to mind for the hive, send guest suggestions to guests at ruseyhive.com.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if you just want to say hi, it's hello at rusihive.com.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: Original music and sonic identity for the Rusi Hive by Ant Food.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, let your life be a creative act.