How Kates-Ferri Projects Turned a Love Story into a Thriving Lower East Side Gallery

She was a patron of street art. He was a Basquiat fan. After connecting online in 2010, KATES-FERRI PROJECTS gallery founders Natalie Kates and Fabrizio Ferri went to see The Radiant Child, a documentary about the famed graffiti artist. Ever since, life and art have been inextricably intertwined for the couple, who opened their eponymous gallery in 2022.

“Our dates all revolved around art museums, gallery shows, and discussing what we saw on the streets,” Kates recalled. True to their passion for the culture of New York City—particularly that of the Lower East Side—the couple held their wedding at the New Museum on the Bowery in 2012. Now, more than a decade later, Kates and Ferri are on the verge of yet another cause for celebration. They’re set to double the size of their Lower East Side gallery in September, expanding to encompass both its original brick-and-mortar space at 561 Grand Street, on a thoroughfare that runs horizontally across Lower Manhattan, as well as its neighboring storefront, dubbed KATES-FERRI PROJECTS: The B-Side.

Kates and Ferri spoke to Artsy from their art-filled home, where in a sense everything started for the couple. Kates had begun collecting early in her time in New York, where she worked as a curator, gallerist, and event producer while Ferri taught business at Harvard Business School, Columbia University, and the University of Miami.

During the pandemic-addled summer of 2020, while isolating in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the couple founded an artist residency called KATES-FERRI PROJECTS to foster a community around artists facing a range of hardships amid the crisis. Wanting to, as Kates said, “jump in” and help, they rallied their friends and networks across New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut to house artists and exhibit their work.

Two years later, they established the brick-and-mortar KATES-FERRI PROJECTS gallery in the Lower East Side, where the couple has lived for more than a decade. They opened the space in spring 2022 with the group exhibition “Homecoming,” featuring former artists in residence including Wynnie Mynerva, Hakeem Olayinka, and Boris Torres.

What’s distinctive about the location of KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is its proximity to the East River and therefore to the eastern boundary of Manhattan. “We’re the furthest east on the gallery map,” Kates said. “We’re in the lower Lower East Side.”

Indeed, the landscape of the Lower East Side—where German, Irish, Jewish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants have historically lived and worked—changes rapidly in the 10-minute walk between KATES-FERRI PROJECTS and other, more central galleries. The block where Kates and Ferri are based is, in Ferri’s words, less famous for its arts scene than for its mom-and-pop shops and laundromats: “It’s not an area people go to unless they live there,” he said.

Nevertheless, the gallerists have thrived. They attract patrons with robust weekly programming and one-on-one conversations with visitors, exemplifying their mission to make fine arts more accessible and inclusive. When an unfamiliar face enters the gallery, Kates likes to introduce herself. “I tell them, ‘I live across the street,’” she said. “‘I’m one of your neighbors.’” As a result, Ferri said, “We’ve created a nice community of local people around our openings.”

Themes of place, home, and connection are equally important to the artists on their roster. The Peruvian artist C.J. Chueca, who splits her time between Lima and New York, makes ceramics resembling airplane windows that frame striated skies, which reflect her memories of being what she calls a “perpetual immigrant.” Martín Touzón carries pieces of his native Argentina with him around the world in the form of pulped fabric he salvages from coin laundromats in Buenos Aires, which he fashions into mixed media wall works. Johannesburg-based artist Turiya Magadlela, meanwhile, sews, rips, and stretches nylon pantyhose over canvases, creating kaleidoscopic meshes of light, color, and tension that evoke both the strained gender and labor politics of South Africa as well as the Lower East Side’s historic garment industry, which in the 1800s formed the livelihood of many of the city’s immigrants.

As gallerists, Kates and Ferri’s tastes bridge the local and the global. For this reason, they attract peripatetic artists into their orbit and, in turn, offer them a sense of belonging. “At openings, you feel you are in a community,” said Chueca, who considers Kates and Ferri embodiments of the idiom “se pone la camiseta.” Translated literally from Spanish, the phrase means “puts on the shirt.” It is used to describe those who selflessly commit to a collective endeavor.