At a Chelsea Art Gallery, an Age Requirement: Over 60 Only
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Version 0 of 1. The gallery Marlena Vaccaro runs in Chelsea has the usual white walls and the usual nice light. What it does not have is artists under 60. Talented 20-, 30- and 40-somethings need not apply. Ms. Vaccaro will not show them. They can send her JPEG after JPEG, the digital equivalent of slide after slide from an artist’s portfolio, but Ms. Vaccaro’s reply will remain: Wait. She will not lower the age threshold at the Carter Burden Gallery, at 548 West 28th Street, near Eleventh Avenue. And the artists on her roster could not be happier. “This gallery has made age very hip,” said Angela Valeria, who is 76 and has a mixed-media painting on unstretched canvas on display in “Summer in the City,” a group show that runs through July 20. The gallery began several years ago when Ms. Vaccaro decided that someone should counter an art world problem: Older, lesser-known artists were being passed by just because they were, yes, older. She had heard stories. Ms. Vaccaro was a painter and printmaker who also worked in mixed media. She had owned a gallery in TriBeCa. “If, by the time you’re 40, you haven’t demonstrated earning power in terms of sales, it’s hard to get the attention of a big gallery,” she said. “I don’t think it’s only ageism at work. It’s the economy of running a gallery. Sure, there are tons of galleries that show older artists, but they are the high earners. Everyone who was big and famous in the ’60s and ’70s is older now. They’re still represented if they’re still alive, and their paintings still sell for gigantic dollars.” Ms. Vaccaro is looking for the “re-emerging older artist.” Some in that category had fast starts and sold paintings for $25,000 or $30,000 in the ’70s, only to stall. “In the last 10 or 15 years, they haven’t had that record of sales,” she said. “They’re excited at being back in a gallery, but they’re looking at slashing the prices for work they used to get so much more for. It’s a difficult conversation: ‘I was reviewed in The New York Times in 1965.’ I’m like, ‘Doesn’t count.’” Others never made it big. Ms. Vaccaro understood. When the planning for the gallery began, she was only 51. “That made me too old to be viable at other galleries because I hadn’t had that big success,” she said. “I’d come up in the world like hundreds of artists. We’re pretty good. But none of our names are above the title, you know?” But at the Burden gallery, she said, “We’ll take that chance on somebody who doesn’t have collectors.” It has had more than 100 solo shows and more than 50 group shows. “Summer in the City” features works by 14 artists. The prices start at $425 and run to $3,000, which Ms. Vaccaro said is the normal range at the gallery. The most expensive was $9,000. The gallery is named for a New York City councilman who was a great-great-grandson of the railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt. Mr. Burden, who was an art collector, died of a heart ailment in 1996 when he was 54. The gallery is an offshoot of the Carter Burden Network. “Our mission is aging services,” said William J. Dionne, the network’s executive director. Running a gallery, he said, “was an issue for our board: ‘Is this mission drift?’” The network has eight locations, including four senior centers that serve meals daily. A separate program arranges classes and activities for people in the early to middle stages of dementia. But the art gallery idea was appealing. “We thought, ‘We’ll give it a try,’” Mr. Dionne said, and the response from artists was immediate. Ms. Vaccaro said she now receives 50 submissions every 60 days. She has a standard reply to those younger than 60: “The good news is: You’re not 60. The bad news is: You’re not 60.” Ms. Vaccaro doubles as associate executive director of the Carter Burden Network. She joined the staff when it was known as the Carter Burden Center for Aging and she was looking for a change. “I thought it was going to be a one-year, let-me-figure-out-my-life, there’s-got-to-be-a-world-beyond-TriBeCa thing,” she said. When the idea for a gallery for the over-60 set came up, “because of my earlier real life, we were able to do it,” she said. A conversation with Ms. Vaccaro and several of the artists exhibited in “Summer in the City” turned to how, before they had discovered Ms. Vaccaro and she discovered them, they struggled to get galleries to look at their work. “I never bother to take my slides anywhere,” Ms. Valeria said. “They don’t bother to look.” “You’re still talking about slides,” Ms. Vaccaro said. “A lot of what we do is bringing people up to speed technologically. Our artists are 60 to 95.” The gallery brought in college students to help with artists’ websites and Instagram accounts. “Instagram is a tool to get our work out to the world,” said Elisabeth Jacobsen, another artist in the “Summer in the City” show. And another, Carol Massa, added that Instagram put the emphasis on the work. “People are not thinking, ‘How old is this artist?’” when they see an image of a painting on Instagram, Ms. Massa said. Ms. Massa, 71, said the Carter Burden Gallery was a “community” where artists could be themselves. For years, she signed her paintings with only her last name. She said the reason was an encounter with Ivan Karp, the legendary owner of the O K Harris Gallery in SoHo, in the 1960s. He looked at her work and said, “This is good,” she recalled. “But he said, ‘There’s a problem. You’re a woman, and it’s very hard to sell women’s works.’” So she dropped her first name. “I said, ‘If Picasso can do it, I can do it,’” she said. “Now I can use my first name.” |