The Gallery Director: Jesse Penridge
“Galleries, TALK TO ALL YOUR PATRONS! Simple, honest communication. We need to all be ambassadors and advocates.”
7 QUESTIONS WITH Jesse Penridge
Director, Tilton Gallery
New York, NY
Jesse Penridge is a long time gallery director, advisor and independent curator. He is a Certified Member of the Appraisers Association of America and active in many of New York's nonprofit arts organizations.
Since 1983, the Tilton Gallery has been well known for discovering and promoting cutting edge, emerging artists from around the world. For more than three decades, Tilton has exhibited hundreds of contemporary artists, many of whom, like David Hammons, Marlene Dumas, Fred Tomaselli, Huang Yong Ping and Francis Alys, to name but a few, have become prominent figures on the international stage.
1. Talk to me about the depth of the impact of these dual crises (public health and economic) and the domino effect.
I think so far one of the most heartening outcomes of the pandemic as it relates to the art world has been seeing the wellspring of community growth and engagement from independent art world professionals, nonprofit arts groups and institutions. Seeing creators and institutions respond to the public health emergency has been the bright spot of this whole ordeal thus far. For instance in my own immediate community and surroundings, photographers have banded together, organizing the group Pictures for Elmhurst, which is creating limited edition photo print with sales benefiting Elmhurst Hospital (one of the hardest hit in New York). Elizabeth Jaeger has started a campaign to put inspirational artist prints in the break rooms of hospitals for overloaded health care workers. Artists are making masks, digital fabricators and designers are making PPE shields for ERs. These sorts of nimble, grassroots efforts where artists are using their talents and putting them into quick and effective action are picking up where larger bureaucracies stammer and get bogged down.
Seeing the problem solving techniques used by these smaller organizations and the support they are getting makes me think that we can grow this model and hopefully create a domino effect.
Ultimately, the domino effect here has augmented the way artists and makers think about their practice, they have fit their practice to address current needs in their community and the domino effect is that we are seeing a different side of many artist’s personalities and practices.
2. How do you see this impacting the market in the short and the long-term?
I think it really depends on which part of the market you’re looking at. In the short term (18 months), times will be tough for small and midsize galleries. Businesses with shallow margins will feel the hit first, which is a fairly well observed phenomenon in times of recession. Blue chip galleries will mostly fair well. In times of crisis, people who need money can sell and those that have disposable income tend to buy at a discount. Great collections can be built in times of crisis. It’s fairly cynical, but at least in my experience that’s what I’ve witnessed. However, the market is a complex ecosystem so the answer to the larger question is much less cut and dry.
While galleries and auction houses are the first place we look when we discuss the ‘marketplace’, there’s a more varied layer of commerce that’s the back bone of this industry, and it functions on an altogether different calculus. This support structure includes art schools, residencies, museums, maker-spaces, and various other nonprofits, along with fabrication studios and freelance art workers. Presently we’re seeing a great financial strain on philanthropy, which will in turn effect this group in complex and often indirect ways. I look at my inbox everyday and see this strain illustrated by at least 10 different nonprofits asking for some type of financial engagement.
I suspect the near future holds a lot of institutional downsizing, many great nonprofits will shutter, we will lose a lot of amazing talent to other industries. Art schools will have to reimagine how they teach and many artist studios that employ contract labor will shrink. I think this is a truth that we are all painfully aware of.
Long term, my hopes are that the present pandemic will shine a light on the financial disparities through out the artworld (as well as other parts of society), and perhaps this moment of reflection will see more philanthropy and financial investment funneled towards smaller entities that are the foundation of the artworld as we know it.
3. As entities are moving their programming and exhibitions online, I am interested in how we convert these quarantine audiences into live patrons. And if we don’t, AND we have a sustained loss of foot traffic due to quarantines, how will galleries truly be impacted?
I think we’d all like to know what the magic bullet is there. Bringing the artworld online has been in the works for over a decade in various forms. More online engagement has been and is necessary to keep the visual arts on the same footing as other media that it competes with for oxygen in the broader ecosystem.
In the same way that the internet has been the great ‘social democratizer’- the availability of resources online has brought the visual arts to far flung communities around the globe that had little or no access to them prior. To the point of your question, I think it is less about conversion from virtual to live and more about adoption as a supplemental tool, which is capable of expanding the pool of stakeholders.
At the end of the day nothing can take the place of sharing physical space with great art. Nothing can or should ever make those experiences nonessential. Can we engage other tools for education and engagement, absolutely.
4. How does this moment lend itself to cultivating new collectors, and how might it impact the landscape of cultural patronage overall?
For a start, I think we have to reimagine patronage a bit. Rather than a singular well-healed benefactor, I hope this moment shows how we can all be patrons towards our own interests.
We are only a little over a month into this, and I am sure we can glean different answers in another month, but one thing that strikes me now as I look around is that creative pursuits are the things keeping people sane. Whether it is seeing my friends Instagramming the perfect sourdough loaf, or a community of artists putting new work out into the world to benefit hospitals, or watching my family and our own craft projects - creativity lies at the center of breathing a little easier.
With all the aspects of this pandemic that we can not control, finding those moments of creative production not only put wonderful things into the world, but maybe more importantly, puts positive directed action and a feeling of accomplishment into our daily lives.
How do we tap into this moment? We get people to realize that regardless of their interest, they are part of a creative community, and perhaps during this time where we have a bit more free time, we all re-evaluate our priorities and make time to support this community.
As for cultural patronage overall, I would hope that such a shift would mean less reliance on single donors giving large gifts. If strategies were implemented to engage more people for smaller gifts, I think we could anticipate broader, and more consistent engagement.
5. Do you see potential for more collaboration across the sector, for example, between galleries and nonprofits, artists and auctions, etc.?
I certainly hope so. I think deeper collaboration has to be the model for the future. If all the different sectors of the ‘artworld’ were more integrated I think you would see less disparity amongst artists, art professionals, and a greater robustness of what is essentially the arts ‘supply-chain’ (to put it in to topical terminology!)
6. Could this crisis shift the focus from a global market to a more local one?
I can only speak for myself, but I think the very notion of a global market is a fallacy. At its core what some call the global market is only a very small fraction of galleries, museum and, at times of much hoopla, auction houses. In my experience we have so many clusters and disparate regional actors that the only time we call it a global market is when we look at the blue chip sector. The blue chip sector may produce headlines with a whopping prices achieved at auction or a new solo shows slated for museums, but truly it’s just a fraction of the whole infrastructure of what I spoke to above - art schools, non profits, galleries, project spaces, arts publications, residencies, cooperatives, which are often the very regional, very underfunded and very necessary components to the foundation of the art world. Do I think this crisis could shift the focus from the global market to a more local one, I certainly hope it does - without these smaller more financially vulnerable stakeholders the whole organism dies.
7. There is a consensus, that the general public does not understand what the arts sector really is. Given your experience, how can we best make this case, which is essential now more than ever?
Again, I think underlining that the arts is not an ivory tower, that it is an ecosystem in which we all participate, whether knowingly or not is paramount and the only viable way forward. This starts with education, it means more community engagement — museums, nonprofits, reach out to those schools in your immediate surroundings but also those schools and communities further afield who may not have such direct access to cultural institutions. Galleries, TALK TO ALL YOUR PATRONS! Simple, honest communication. We need to all be ambassadors and advocates.
Jesse Penridge is a long time gallery director, advisor and independent curator. He is a Certified Member of the Appraisers Association of America and active in many of New York's nonprofit arts organizations.