As Fall Art Season Opens, New York Galleries Stay Stubbornly Optimistic

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

Earlier this year, Mathieu Borysevicz, founder of Shanghai’s Bank gallery, began a six-month pop-up on the Lower East Side. Borysevicz, who has split his time between New York and China since the pandemic, wanted to put Bank’s program in front of new audiences. The timing seemed right, he said. He pointed to Asian-focused arts nonprofit Initial Research, which kicked off programming this summer, the Met’s opening for “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie,” a show that included works by Bank artist Patty Chang; and the launch of Hong Kong mainstay Kiang Malingue’s New York outpost. In mid-March, Bank drew a warm welcome from the downtown art scene, but as spring turned to summer, Borysevicz watched the market deflate in real time.

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“Even in the short time we’ve been here, I felt it shift,” he told ARTnews in mid-August at Stone Street Café, a coffee shop located a few blocks from Bank’s space. He had just handed the keys back to dealer Nathalie Karg, who spent most of this year on sabbatical.

“At first, the whole scene was like, ‘Yeah, it’s hard, but we have great collectors that continue to support us,’” Borysevicz said. “And then it suddenly became, ‘those collectors are now gone.’”

It’s been a challenging summer for the art world. The usually quiet post-Basel period saw once-stalwart galleries fold, as well as an ever-lengthening list of explosive lawsuits and conciliatory fair cancellations. Together, the closures, lawsuits, and cancellations were the most visible evidence of a market in turmoil. But as the fall begins, galleries are taking different tacks on fairs, exhibition-making, and collector outreach. In other words, they are figuring out how to move forward.

“Every field has cyclical challenges, external challenges, and internal challenges,” Mary Sabbatino, vice president of Galerie Lelong & Co. (New York and Paris), told ARTnews. “I think now both the external and internal are meeting, and people are saying, ‘Wow, how does one do business in this climate? We have to change.’”

Some things are like the weather—out of one’s control and to be endured. The most obvious, to the eye of longtime Chelsea dealer Jack Shainman, is President Donald Trump’s ever-expanding trade war. By his assessment, the art market was making real strides toward recovery until February’s tariff announcement knocked the global economy off its axis.

“I have a lot of Canadian clients,” Shainman told ARTnews. “Out of principle, they are not coming here. At some point, these things catch up. And it scares me because it’s so out of our control. But we continue to do what we do. We plug along because we believe in what we do. We love art and believe the artists are important.”

A Fair Reset

The current market has a way of sorting the good businesspeople from the bad—or at least rewarding those who’ve exercised restraint. “It is a time for caution and revisiting every single art fair and art fair expense and travel and entertainment,” dealer Alexander Gray told ARTnews. Gray added that he is scrutinizing “every budget line,” though that practice predates the current market. That’s been their modus operandi since completing a two-year small-business management program shortly after founding his eponymous gallery in 2006. 

Gray is far from the only dealer reconsidering his budget. After participating in eight fairs this year, Borysevicz recently made the difficult decision to pull Bank out of Art Basel Miami Beach. While that would be a hit to any gallerist’s ego—after years of work to get into a premier fair—Borysevicz knew it was the right decision for the gallery. Going forward, Bank is no longer going to do fairs “just to do them,” as he put it.

“Next year, if we have an idea that we feel is appropriate [for a certain fair], we’ll do it,” Borysevicz said. By way of illustration, he pointed to the gallery’s presentation at the Armory Show last year, which showcased two monumental Mylar sculptures by Oliver Herring, made in the ’90s during the AIDS crisis. The important early works felt especially poignant to show in New York, since Herring has long been based in the city. Both pieces were acquired by museums. (Bank will participate in Art Basel Paris, however, with an environmental installation by Duyi Han in the Emergence sector.)

Veteran dealer James Cohan is participating in the Armory Show this year, with a group presentation anchored by a monumental sculpture by Kennedy Yanko in the fair’s public program. He’s also going to Paris in October, but he’s not participating in Art Basel. Instead, the gallery will stage a pop-up in the Marais neighborhood, featuring two solo exhibitions for Elias Sime and Kelly Sinnapah Mary.

“Fairs have become, more and more, one-day events,” Cohan said of the decision. “We’re trying to stand out a little bit from the fray and give people a place to go.”

Shainman has long limited his fair activity mostly to Art Basel’s flagship editions in Basel, Paris, and Miami Beach.

“I feel like art fairs are starting to be an outdated model,” Shainman said. “There’s just too many, and the organizers pretend to be interested in the galleries, but quite honestly, we’re just there to put up the show and pay the money. They get the door.”

Shainman is instead focused on the $18 million, 20,000-square-foot space he opened in a 19th-century building in Tribeca earlier this year. The development of the new space was directly informed by his experience with the School, the upstate New York outpost he opened over a decade ago. There, the gallery has had success hosting large-scale exhibitions at a slower pace than is typical for commercial galleries. In Tribeca, on Friday, he will open “I Am Many,” an exhibition of works by Hank Willis Thomas that surveys the artist’s work of the past five years. The show will remain on view for two months—an unusually long run for a gallery exhibition, but one that will be typical for shows mounted at  Shainman’s new space.

Keeping Overhead Low and Finding New Collectors

A short cab ride away, Graham Wilson, founder of Tribeca’s Swivel Gallery, was clad in a white tank top and work gloves, hard at work alongside his artist Simon Benjamin. They were putting the finishing touches on Tidalectic No. 1, 2025, a 700-pound resin sculpture accompanied by a two-channel video work. The installation is featured this week in the Armory Show’s Platform section, dedicated to large-scale works.

“We built this together. One whole week of pouring resin,” Wilson said proudly. “Things like that aren’t achievable on your own.”

Swivel—founded in 2021 in Bed-Stuy—is doing 10 fairs this year, up from six in 2024, with no plans to slow down in 2026. This fall alone, the gallery will be at the Armory Show, Untitled Houston, and Untitled Miami. Wilson almost always presents solo booths at fairs because, in his view, it signals “confidence” in his artists.

“Confidence” is one word to describe Wilson’s character; another might be “stubbornness.” Two years ago, when the market first started to turn, he told his artists—many of whom are still in their 20s—to apply for residencies and grants, and that there’s no shame in picking up part-time gigs, if their work struggled to sell. One thing he had no interest in doing, he said, was “caving to market pressure.”

“I decided, if we close, we fucking close. But we’re going out standing on our own two feet,” he said. “We’re not going out doing silly shit.”

A gambler’s mindset underlies Wilson’s confidence, but so does a furious work ethic inherited from his blue-collar upbringing in Kentucky. Swivel is a lean operation that Wilson likens to The Bear—the FX on Hulu series about a high-strung Chicago chef. Until recently, Swivel was just him, his gallery manager, and a part-time art handler. In June, Aida Valdez—who founded MAD54, a platform dedicated to cultivating new collectors—joined as the gallery’s sales director.

“I don’t need to pretend that I don’t do every job here. I spackle the wall, paint the wall, clean the floor, mop the floor, clean the bathroom,” he said. “Why do I need to pretend that I don’t do that?”

Leanness may keep overhead low, but Swivel’s growth—Wilson said the gallery has doubled sales every year since launching—is likely due to another savvy decision. Most of its collectors are under 50 and new to the art world. While that has meant educating new collectors, it also means there’s ample wall space to fill—and some insulation from the more traditional buyer base that has recently pulled back. While a few more established collectors have bought works from the gallery, according to Wilson, Swivel has always been premised on the idea that, with art now more mainstream than ever, there’s a major opportunity to onboard whole new groups of people into collecting.

The art of courting new collectors is not lost on Harper Levine, who has galleries in Chelsea, East Hampton, and—starting next spring—Bangkok. Levine, who also operates a downtown bookstore and an Upper East Side apartment gallery, insists that Bangkok won’t be business as usual. He’s focused on building a hospitality arm that folds food, wellness, and everyday experiences in with the exhibitions.

“We are in the intimacy business and the hospitality business,” he told ARTnews, describing Harper’s as a place where the encounter matters as much as the transaction.

That philosophy also shapes how he runs the galleries closer to home. Lavish dinners and splashy events are out; smaller, more personal gatherings are in. He prefers evenings where the food is simple, the atmosphere casual, and people actually talk. It’s less about showing off than about creating an environment where collectors and artists feel like participants rather than customers. Levine knows that for many newcomers, the real obstacle isn’t price but perception—galleries can feel forbidding, cold, and, let’s face it, plain unwelcoming. He tries to counteract that with pop-ups, bookstore events, and other open events that may draw audiences new to the gallery. Once inside attendees are met with conversation, not sales pitches.

An eye toward audiences not already in the art world also animates Fairchild Fries, who opened the Lower East Side’s Abri Mars last September. A former brand designer for Apple and Saint Laurent, Fries has a deep network in fashion; he’s new to the art world, though he’s a quick study. In July, he launched a highly impromptu “invitational” fair for Upstate Art Weekend. By late August, he was accepted to NADA Miami—his first official fair.

Abri Mars is opening the season with “One of One,” a group exhibition of intimate, personal works mostly by photographers better known for their fashion work, like Gray Sorrenti, Mario Sorrenti, and Shaniqwa Jarvis. Also included are established fine-art photographers such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Barbara Ess—the former courtesy of David Zwirner, the latter via Magenta Plains, a gallery in Chinatown. Fries sees the show as a way to offer “a bridge” between fashion and art—two worlds that have increasingly collided over the last decade.

“A lot of the people that I know are in the commercial art world. But they are still so inspired by fine art, and they want to engage with the art world, but they don’t know where to start,” Fries told ARTnews. “It’s exciting, I think, to be part of growing a completely new collector base.”

While there’s been much written of late about whether millennials or Generation Z are even interested in art collecting, Gordon VeneKlasen, co-owner of Michael Werner Gallery, has heard none of that doomsaying. Much of his time over the last six months, he told ARTnews, has been spent with young collectors. “They really want to talk and they really want to know why something is worth their attention,” he said. They are discerning, too, he said, noting that one young Los Angeles collector he works with visited the gallery’s Francis Picabia show half a dozen times before finally making a purchase. “He knew his stuff, and was willing to take the time to make the right decision for him,” he added.

To Lelong’s Sabbatino, midcareer galleries go through growing pains, just like midcareer artists. The former’s problem is more generational. The collectors she courted in her early years are now entering their 70s, 80s, or even 90s. “We’re all asking ourselves the same question: how does one revitalize a client base?”

For Magenta Plains, the answer has largely been a steady, determined focus on artists the gallery believes deserve more institutional attention, like Haitian American artist Paul Gardère, whose posthumous show opens the gallery’s fall programming. That exhibition follows a recent survey at the Stuyvesant Fish House at Gardère’s alma mater, the Cooper Union.

“We are artists,” said Olivia Smith, referring to herself and fellow cofounders Chris Dorland and David Deutsch. “There are obviously other measures of success, but we’ve placed a number of artworks in museum collections in the last few years, and have more in the pipeline. It takes patience and dedication, a lot of effort and storytelling. But that is something that we prioritize and value.”

A More Collaborative Art World on the Horizon

VeneKlasen meanwhile, is convinced the gallery model itself will shift. The idea of one gallery handling everything for an artist is, in his view, giving way to more cooperative arrangements. Michael Werner has long co-represented artists, and VeneKlasen thinks that approach will become more common. “If an artist makes enough work and the dealers are putting in the effort, there’s no reason why co-representation deals shouldn’t work,” he said. “It’s an absolute plus for everybody.” Partnerships, he suggested, are not a sign of weakness but of pragmatism.

Cohan agreed, pointing to recent collaborations between his gallery, Cape Town’s Goodman Gallery, and London’s Stephen Friedman, with whom Cohan’s gallery staged exhibitions for the British Nigerian painter Yinka Shonibare.

“Instead of trying to kill each other, it’s better to operate in an ecosystem where you realize you can’t get to everybody,” he said.

A more “convivial,” collegiate atmosphere permeates Tribeca, where Cohan relocated in 2019—early in the neighborhood’s migration wave—after more than 15 years in Chelsea. The latter neighborhood “was much more cutthroat,” he said. “I never felt like I had a community, apart from a few people.”

Along with Cohan’s space, Walker Street is home to Kaufmann Repetto, Anton Kern, and Bortolami; half a block away is Andrew Kreps, all of them (along with Kurimanzutto) dealers he collaborated with in launching the Campus, a 78,000-square-foot storage space and exhibition venue in Upstate New York.

“It’s dumb luck that we ended up on the right street,” Cohan said.

Cohan believes that moments like the current one demand reinvention from dealers who want to survive. He pointed to Paula Cooper’s shift in the 1980s from a focus on Minimalism and Post-Minimalism to working with younger artists like Robert Gober and Elizabeth Murray—and to Ileana Sonnabend’s 1986 decision, after years of showing Arte Povera and Transavanguardia, to mount the seminal “Neo-Geo” group show featuring then-upstarts Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, and Peter Halley.

“What we survive on today is not what we will survive on in five years. You can count on that. That’s the history of every gallery,” Cohan said. “The key to it all is to continue to keep looking. The minute you rest on your laurels, you’re cooked.”