HOUSE PARTY

Married couple Joe Bradley and Valentina Akerman are reinventing what the art gallery can be. By Dodie Kazanjian.

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Last summer I kept getting emails about a new venue called Galerie Sardine. Who, I wondered, would want to name a gallery after a small fish that travels in schools and is packed tightly in flat tins? The artist Joe Bradley and his irrepressible wife, Valentina Akerman, that's who. "You can take it with you," Akerman says, when I visit them in Bradley's vast Long Island City studio. "It's also not a fancy fish, and we like that." Neither of them had ever run an art gallery before, but they took over a 1701 farmhouse in Amagansett, Long Island, and put on several shows that attracted throngs of local and far-flung art lovers, including the biggest fish in the art world, Larry Gagosian.

“Joe and I have been collaborating ever since we met,” Akerman tells me. Their backgrounds could hardly be more different. Akerman, dark-haired and vivacious, is from Bogotá, Colombia. Bradley, quieter but just as playful, grew up in a family of nine children in the scenic little beach town of Kittery, Maine. His father was an emergency room doctor. Her now retired father was a professor of economics at the National University of Colombia and wrote a Sunday newspaper editorial. “He is an incredibly luminous person who's engaged with the world,” she tells me. “My decibel of life comes from my father.” Her mother, now an author, was a Freudian therapist who worked with children and adolescents. “My schoolmates were scared of her.” They thought she was “like a witch,” Akerman says. “She's mysterious and a bit cold and a bit alluring all at once.” (“She's a very glamorous woman,” Bradley adds.)