Incollect Magazine - Issue 9

Incollect Magazine 73 City,” by the Metropolitan Museum of Art archives, with 75 works by 41 African American artists. There were many dealers like Halpert in the decades that followed. Recent histories of art galleries run by women from the 1920s to the present tend to focus on how women dealers challenge male-dominated narratives of the art market, but men and women dealers often worked together, collaborating in building markets for art and artists. Perhaps the best example is Romanian Ileana Sonnabend, the former wife of the famed art dealer Leo Castelli. The couple left Europe during the 1940s and set up shop in New York where during the 1950s they promoted American Pop art. In 1961 she opened the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris where she exhibited the work of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein to European audiences and later returned to New York where she continued to show groundbreaking artists such as Jeff Koons at her gallery right up until her death in 2007. Sonnabend’s personal art collection was valued at the time of her death to be worth $876 million. Shaping the Scene Guggenheim, Halpert, and Sonnabend served as examples and influenced the women art dealers who followed. Even today their life stories and legacy as dealers, patrons, and collectors continue to fascinate and inspire. Holly Solomon was one New York art dealer who during the 1970s and 1980s styled herself on Guggenheim, blurring the lines between collector, patron, and dealer. She championed Pop art and the female-dominated Pattern and Decoration movement, which was a reaction to male-dominated Minimalism. She also commissioned numerous self-portraits from her ga ller y artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe. Mary Boone, Paula Cooper, Barbara Gladstone, and Marion Goodman are four other important, inf luential women art dealers who have played a defining role in the formation of the New York art world from the 1960s to the present. Paula Cooper opened her first gallery in Soho with $4,400 in 1968 and championed minimalist artists like Dan Flavin, Jo Baer, Donald Judd, Robert Roman, and Carl Andre. Marion Goodman opened her gallery in 1977 to showcase the work of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers after, as a collector and fan, she was unable to find another gallery to show his work. Her gallery played an important role in bringing European artists to the attention of New York audiences, including Christian Boltanski, Maurizio Cattelan, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Tacita Dean, William Kentridge, Anselm Kiefer, Juan Muñoz, Gabriel Orozco, and others. Barbara Gladstone promoted new media and conceptual artists like Mathew Barney, Huang Yong Ping, and Shirin Neshat, while Mary Boone, who opened her SoHo gallery in 1977, championed 1980s painters Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Ross Bleckner as well as Barbara Kruger and Laurie Simmons. In 1982 a New York magazine profile called the stylish young dealer ‘The New Queen of the Art Scene.’ The gallery played a significant role in the 1980s art market and in 1984, Jean Michel Basquiat joined after his first solo show there. The Legacy Continues Today, the world of art dealers is a much more diverse and global community that includes women dealers from different cultures and nationalities. Female dealers Isabel Sullivan Isabel Sullivan Gallery, New York After working in galleries in New York’s Chelsea and SoHo districts for a decade, Sullivan opened her eponymous gallery in 2023 on Lispenard Street in the heart of Tribeca’s design and gallery district. “The mission of our gallery is to create an inviting space that is transparent, fair, and welcoming to all visitors,” Sullivan says. Her gallery exhibits a mix of artists from radically varying backgrounds at varying moments in their careers, including Joseph Santore, Pia Dehne, Elisa Jensen, Richard Hambleton, and Frank Webster. Her next exhibition brings together three international women painters. “We seek out exceptional talent and are dedicated to supporting our artists’ future growth, renaissance, or rediscovery,” she says. Sullivan also has a desire to make her gallery more than just a venue for showing art. “We approach our space with the desired outcome of benefiting and enriching all, and open our doors to share in diverse experiences.” “I want to use my platform to show more women and queer artists,” says Sullivan. “While the most important thing to me is to seek out great art, and there are many wonderful male artists that I work with, I’m interested in showing more diverse points of view, ones that I can relate to and also learn from.”