After 40 Years, New York Gallerist Jack Shainman Is Still Dreaming Big

“First and foremost, you have to really believe in the art and love the art,” Jack Shainman told Artsy from The School, his gallery’s 30,000-square-foot project space in Kinderhook, New York. Opened in 2013, The School is illustrative of Shainman’s large-scale approach to programming, which he is continuing with his latest space in Tribeca, covering 20,000 square feet within an Italian Renaissance Revival building.

Opened on the year of the gallery’s 40th anniversary, the new space marks a major milestone for Shainman, who is continuing to prioritize more challenging projects. “For me, it was the volume of space and the ability to install so many different [projects] and really to keep up with the vision of our artists,” the gallerist told Artsy.

Shainman founded his gallery in 1984 with his late partner Claude Simard, a French Canadian painter and art dealer who passed away in 2014. Its first gallery, opened in Washington, D.C., was initially funded by selling Simard’s artworks and moved into New York’s East Village in 1986. A short stint in SoHo followed before the gallery landed at its current Chelsea flagship in 1997. Along the way, it has steadily grown to become one of New York’s most influential tastemakers, thanks to its reputation for presenting artists for the first time in the city, including the likes of Hank Willis Thomas and Toyin Ojih Odutola. Today, the gallery represents artists such as El Anatsui, Leslie Wayne, and Radcliffe Bailey.

A critical characteristic of Shainman’s philosophy is his long-term approach. “We have a lot of long-lasting relationships,” Shainman said. Many of Shainman’s artists have been mainstays for over two decades, including the late photographer Malick Sidibé, whom he first met in Mali in 2002, and Spanish painter Carlos Vega, Shainman’s spouse who was working as an art handler when Shainman first met him in 1994.

From early on, the gallerist took chances on new artists and stuck with them as their careers grew. As Shainman’s roster grew to encompass monumental figures, his vision and influence expanded accordingly. The School—which, as its name suggests, is a former high school—is situated near Shainman’s farm in Upstate New York, providing ample opportunity. Here, Shainman could freely curate massive presentations, such as its inaugural show of sculptures by American sculptor Nick Cave, whom the gallery has worked with since 2005.

A similar motivation guided the opening of Shainman’s Tribeca space, which he had anticipated taking six months to renovate. Instead, the extensive upgrades to the former Beaux-Arts bank hall—maintaining the architectural integrity of its 29-foot-high ceilings and elegant white marble columns—stretched into nearly three years. Then, this January, after weeks of planning, the project culminated in an astonishing turnaround for the opening exhibition, Richard Mosse’s installation Broken Spectre (2018–-22) displayed on a 60-foot-wide LED screen. This immersive video documents the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, capturing the willful damage done to the environment by humans. To prepare the massive space for such an ambitious show was so daunting that Shainman jokingly suggested it could qualify for a Guinness World Record and underscored why the new space was opened. If institutions weren’t going to show the work, Shainman could.

“I wanted that video to be shown in New York,” Shainman said. “A few museums considered it, but nobody stepped up to the plate, although it’d been shown all over the world. And I just thought it was important to do that when it was such an important message.”

Through spaces like The School and the expansive new Tribeca location, Shainman ensures that artists have the space and resources to bring their most imaginative and large-scale works to life. Across both New York spaces, Jack Shainman Gallery recently closed a dual-venue exhibition for Diedrick Brackens’s “Blood Compass,” featuring large-scale tapestries hanging from the mezzanine in Tribeca. Concurrently, at The School, Nina Chanel Abney’s expansive exhibition opened on May 18th. This commitment to embracing projects is evident as Shainman continues to provide platforms that are commensurate with the ambitions of the artists that he works with—not just in the physical sense.

“I gravitate toward artists where there’s content—not only an ability to make something, do something, or represent something, but that it means something,” Shainman said.

Shainman continues to invigorate his roster with new artists, including the conceptual artist Charisse Pearlina Weston and Philadelphia-based artist Becky Suss. This aligns with his original motivation to inject fresh energy into the art world. By weaving these new voices into the gallery’s four-decade legacy, Shainman works on what he likens to “a chorus,” where diverse expressions and legacies converge and resonate, sustaining Shainman’s founding vision of revitalizing and diversifying the art landscape.

Meanwhile, in New York, the neighborhoods of Tribeca and Chelsea have seen a litany of gallery closures, with mid-size tastemakers like JTT, Denny Gallery, and Cheim & Read shuttering within the last year. Each gallery, for Shainman, is a loss for the city’s art scene, noting that higher density for art spaces improves the market. “The art world is so different in New York—now there are two stores to buy weed on every block, and it’s overkill, but with [more] galleries, it’s better,” he explained.