Two Gallerists Unpack Harlem’s Community-Driven Neighborhood
Installation view of “Dennis Owusu-Ansah and Nii Narku Thompson: Ghanaian Artists in Portraiture” at Calabar Gallery, 2022. Courtesy of Calabar Gallery.
The Harlem Renaissance is the most globally recognized movement of Black American culture in the art world. Emerging in the 1920s and lasting through the early 1940s, it marked a creative boom of Black cultural production across fine art, dance, literature, and music—including such luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Katherine Dunham, Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, James Van Der Zee, and Jacob Lawerence.
Due to this outreach, Harlem became a global center for Black individuals across the diaspora to live and create among other kin. For example, the Studio Museum in Harlem chose Harlem as a site to emphasize the Upper Manhattan neighborhood as the cultural capital of Black America while nodding to the role that its community plays in shaping the museum’s programming and exhibitions.
While few galleries exist in the neighborhood today, there is an abundance of artists and cultural institutions based in the area who continue to cultivate bonds with one another. Artsy spoke with Claire Oliver, founder and director of her eponymous gallery, and Atim Annette Oton, founder and director of Calabar Gallery, to unpack how Harlem’s community determines their success and outreach.
“How I look at the community is that it is a representation of me. [Harlem] is all kinds of people…there is immigration from the Caribbean, the [American] South, and Africa,” Oton told Artsy in a phone interview. Her gallery, which is named after her birth city of Calabar, Nigeria, first existed as a roaming site for a decade before setting up shop in 2016. Oton situates the rich melting pot of the Black diaspora as the key foundation of what makes Harlem Harlem, insofar as it demonstrates that Blackness is not a monolith.
It is this distinctive culture that led Claire Oliver to relocate her gallery from Chelsea—which is roughly 100 blocks removed from Harlem and lacks its diversity—in 2017 to not only be in the same community where she lives, but to also exist in one that reflects her roster of artists, which includes Simone Elizabeth Saunders, Stan Squirewell, and Gio Swaby.
“Being in Chelsea, we represent all of these Brown and Black artists and we’re in this neighborhood where their own community does not get to come and see them,” Oliver described to Artsy. “We always represented these groups that did these amazing works but no one pays attention to them because they don’t have the white European background…this has been the vision for Claire Oliver Gallery for the past 30 years.”
The audience for any Harlem cultural center is not just out-of-town art-goers but residents and, often, the youth. Both Oliver and Oton highlighted to Artsy how many children come out to the gallery openings, something that is uncommon in the Chelsea district.
Oliver recounted to Artsy a recent observation involving Black abstractionist Adebunmi Gbadebo, who currently has a solo show at the gallery titled “Remains,” on view through March 11th. When Gbadebo brought her young nieces to see her work at the gallery and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they were surprised to see art by someone who is alive, let alone by their aunt.
Oliver emphasized that this account, which is not unique to Gbadebo, is something she has witnessed at her galleries as children actively communicate and express their thoughts about works on view. Oliver describes these accounts as pivotal encounters in developing and directly shaping the next generation of the community.
Oton’s role as a leader of community engagement similarly creates a circuitous loop in Harlem as she bridges connections between artists and spaces in the area. “I relaunched [this community initiative] as a way to generate traffic for all of us in Harlem,” Oton said. “Harlem is one of the few communities that is local.”
The locality of Harlem, including speaking to your neighbors and community outreach, is part of Claire Oliver Gallery’s and Calabar Gallery’s identity. While Harlem has many tourists, Oliver expressed that she educates her non-local clients on the rich history of Harlem by taking them out or recommending other key cultural sites to visit, ranging from sites like the legendary Apollo Theater to her favorite up-and-coming restaurants. All the work of the gallery is aimed at further enriching its community.
In 2015, Chelsea galleries cast their eyes to Harlem. This was initiated by the audacious move of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise gallery from its Greenwich Village spot to 439 West 127th Street in West Harlem. The move spawned a series of articles and murmurs that fellow Chelsea spaces would follow suit, which led to accusations of gentrification. However, by 2023, this has not occurred. Many of the galleries that made the move following Gavin Brown have since shuttered or relocated elsewhere, be that back to Chelsea or to the fast-rising Tribeca area in Lower Manhattan.
Of that period, Oton told Artsy that “I found it [interesting] because it was like, ‘Oh, Chelsea is here, so now we are relevant.’” Oton found the hype ironically irrelevant because while Chelsea brought its audience to Harlem, its audience did not go outside and interact with the neighborhood. “Harlemites are very territorial; if you’re not here for [the community] they will ignore you,” Oton said. Oliver expressed similar admiration for “how loyal Harlem is to those who show up for them,” she said.
For Oton, the future of Harlem lies in supporting younger artists and galleries. “The community will continue on…the people who live here are fiercely protective of this neighborhood,” she said. “Everyone is welcome but those who are here want to be involved in [sustaining] it and Harlem embraces that.”
