Mom & Popped

In a market contraction, the middle class gallery is getting squeezed.

- Nate Freeman

Steven Stewart opened his gallery in 2011 in Tribeca and called it Kansas, a reference to his home state. He built a collector base, a following. In 2015 he moved across town to the Lower East Side to be in the thick of a district some see as New York’s most vital: a place where art dealers can focus on a single storefront venue, not on world domination, and survive by selling work by exciting artists that Chelsea mega galleries haven’t stolen yet. Kansas Gallery was a mom-and-pop space.

After one year on Rivington Street, Stewart announced he was closing the gallery. The email was simple. It was just a picture of Barack Obama waving goodbye.

“I’m not sick, I’m not broke, I’m just over it—you know, you can do that,” said Stewart, who is in his late thirties and sports a short scruffy beard, a few days later at a restaurant in Tribeca. He was drinking Chardonnay. It was 2:00 pm. The wound was still a little fresh.

“What I never wanted was to be one of these life-support galleries that are operating on massive deficits, owing God and her husband money, and just can’t hit the off switch because of ego or hubris,” he told me.

He was speaking calmly, though with an animus. Kansas was part of what has been described to me by dealers as the art world’s “middle class”: single-venue operations that fight to get by month-to-month, facing a market contraction at a time when the globe-conquering mega galleries, which have become corporatized behemoths, can stay afloat while others fail.

And without any kind of safety net, the question of failure starts to look more like a when than an if.