Bronwyn Keenan On Opening a Gallery, Buying Art, and Impressions of Buffalo
by :
Emily Ebba Reynolds
Bronwyn Keenan at her home. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez
Before moving to Buffalo, I started Bass & Reiner Gallery with three colleagues from graduate school in San Francisco. Our gallery focused on showing emerging artists, especially artists from our peer group, and pairing or putting them in dialogue with artists from other places. This experience, and what we do at The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (BICA), were on my mind when I recently sat down for a conversation with Bronwyn Keenan.
Keenan is the director of the University at Buffalo’s Arts Collaboratory: an initiative that aims to foster collaboration between the arts disciplines at UB as well as experimentation both at the University and throughout Buffalo and Western New York. Keenan has an impressive résumé, including stints as the Head of Special Events at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (think Met Gala) and the Director of Special Events at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. But before all that, Keenan founded and ran an eponymous gallery that became influential to a generation of artists in downtown New York City in the 1990s. Carol Bove, Liz Deschenes, Katherine Bernhardt, and Guy Overfelt are just some of the artists who showed there early in their careers. During a tumultuous time in the city’s art scene, her gallery was one of a precious few promoting the work of emerging artists.
Emily Reynolds: Can you tell me a little about how and why you started Bronwyn Keenan Gallery?
Bronwyn Kennan: Well, I started it in September of 1995. I opened the gallery because I noticed that a lot of my peers weren’t represented. That seems to be a reason that a lot of people want to open galleries, because they notice their friends or people they admire in their generation aren’t being represented. It was just after the big market crash of the early ’90s, so a lot of galleries in New York City had gone out of business, and the art market was really changing. What you had were Exit Art and Thread Waxing Space and White Columns (which had been around a long time). These places really picked up the slack when the blue chip galleries either weren’t in a position to show or weren’t that interested in Gen X artists.
I remember calling up Michael Ashkin. I left a message on his answering machine saying, “I’m sure everybody’s calling you because that show you’re in at Exit Art is so great, but I would really love to do a studio visit if you have the time.” And he called me back and said, “Bronwyn, you’re the only person who’s called me. You’re welcome to come over any time.” So that kind of started it. I had been tracking Brad Kahlhamer’s work too, and so I did a two-person show with them that fall that was really well received. It was a very small community at the time: Gavin Brown, Casey Kaplan, Lauren Wittels, and me. Nobody was selling anything. We would all call each other, like, “I heard you sold something!? How much did you sell that for?” “I sold that for $200.”
ER: Did you have a style or aesthetic that you wanted to show? How did you build your program—and your client base?
BK: It was just stuff I liked. I think that a sort of style developed that had a certain kind of naivete and drew on pop culture. I really liked artists who created their own worlds. You kind of see that. I remember seeing David Scher show at Pierogi; that made a big impact on me. Also Nicole Eisenman—artists who were approaching installation in a different kind of way. It wasn’t so bombastic, it was really intimate and immediate. Everything felt like there was an urgency to it. It didn’t seem like everybody was taking themselves so seriously.
There was this thing with scale that was happening at the time: everything sort of shrunk. There was a preponderance of drawing and these small objects. Probably part of that was market driven, you know, maybe someone will buy this [small] piece for $200. A lot of my clients in the beginning were the people that I waited on at the restaurant where I worked on the Lower East Side. There was a voiceover guy who had some money; he was one of the few people I knew that had enough money to buy art. And this actor Patty Green, who was in movies and on Broadway in the ’90s; he bought a lot of stuff and had a great collection. He had a really early Catherine Opie, and he bought some work by both Michael Ashkin and Brad Kahlhamer. He bought a lot from Gavin and all those guys. So yeah, it was hard. We all traded the few collectors that were out there.
ER: It felt really similar at Bass & Reiner, the gallery I co-ran in the Bay Area. A few collectors kept us all afloat. Is there one show or project that you realized at the gallery that stands out as a big accomplishment?
BK: I really liked a show I kind of co-curated with Brad [Kahlhamer] called Landscape USA. I got to show Forrest Bess together with beautiful works by Karen Kilimnik and Lari Pittman. There was something about that show that was kind of all over the place, but it really felt like a particular moment in American landscape painting, one coming out of a really broad interpretation of landscape. I was living in my gallery at the time, and I would just sit up all night looking at that Forrest Bess. And there was a John Wesley—I was really surprised by how much I ended up loving John Wesley. I just kept looking back at the work and thinking “that is so deceptive.” The painting was just like three black palm trees against a blue landscape. It had some weird energy. That was a good thing about living in the gallery, too; I could sit there all night long staring at the work. I think that’s why I really started it: I wanted to look at more art!
ER: You also buy art. Which came first, buying or showing? What was the first piece of art you bought?
BK: I think they kind of started at the same time. The first work I ever bought was one of David Scher’s drawings, out of the flat files at Pierogi. I really loved their flat files because it really was a democratic way of giving everybody the opportunity to buy something. Everybody could participate and potentially sell work too. If you had the wherewithal, you could go in there and just look through the flat files and find something. I think it was all $200 and under. So I bought a David Scher, which for me was like my tips for a month. A big investment in 1995 or whenever it was. I went back a few times. And that’s how I started buying art. It was always drawings, and then at the same time, I decided to open the gallery.
ER: Running a gallery myself kind of hooked me on buying art—but we’re in a position now where we need to be careful not to go overboard because of space and storage. You have continued to buy art—how do you make decisions about what to buy? What inspires you to buy a piece of art?
BK: I know! I don’t even think about the storage. I know I should! I mean, I’m trying to just stop because it’s expensive. Once you see something special, it’s hard to get it out of your mind. It sticks with you, and it’s hard to turn away from it. So you make sacrifices.
ER: So your decisions are based on an emotional response?
BK: Yes—if I walk away and it stays with me.
ER: You’ve been in Buffalo for about six months, working at UB. So far, what strikes you about our art community here?
BK: Just the sheer volume of creative activity going on here. It’s been really surprising and inspiring. And, I mean, it’s not all great all the time, but it isn’t in New York—or anywhere—either. I love the moxie here. If you want to open a space, you can open a space, and there’s going to be some support for that—at least the “You can do it!” kind of support.
I think the thing that Buffalo needs is more financial support from people that have the means. To support galleries and to support all the disciplines of the arts—there’s a little bit of that, but it feels like it’s really in its infancy still, right?
ER: Yeah.
BK: It strikes me that the people who have the means need to step in because they are needed to keep the scene going, like to keep you guys at BICA afloat while you continue risking your financial future. It’s so stressful having a gallery, you know, people have to step up.
ER: So, who do you think needs to be in Buffalo right now? If you could convince anyone in the world to move to Buffalo, who would it be?
BK: Well, you know, I have been bringing all my friends here, and some have been talking about moving here. David Scher wrote me an email yesterday and said, “I’d really like to move to Buffalo, but my wife doesn’t want to go.” So there’s my generation, but they’re kind of a little old now. People have families. It’s more your generation that I’d like to see come here. We’ve got to persuade more millennials.
One little thing that I’ve been doing with developer Sam Savarino is kind of part of that—the first piece of the puzzle. I’ve been going to him and saying, “I’d love to have a live/work loft donated to the Arts Collaboratory to keep top student artists from leaving here.” Like, artist Annie Bielski, for example; she didn’t stay after she graduated. She is coming back because we’re giving her the atrium at the Center for the Arts.
ER: I didn’t know that!
BK: So she’ll be here for some time. But the larger question is how do you keep people connected to Buffalo even if they don’t want to commit to living here today? It seems like there is a funny thing where creative people cycle back here. There’s so much love for the city.
ER: Is there anything else you can tell us about what you’re working on with the Arts Collaboratory?
BK: I’ve been refining what the Arts Collaboratory is working on—messaging and also the programming—and that will launch this fall. I’ve been reimagining the Center for the Arts as a space so we finally have art in the atrium. We’re currently exhibiting Pam Glick’s tarp paintings. They have never really come off the floor in her studio, but on the walls at UB they are spectacular; the light in there is really extraordinary—so everything looks really good. Once you put art up in a space like that, you suddenly see all the possibilities.
And I’ve been collaborating with the Department of Media Study on a short film about what it is to be a young artist living and working Buffalo, touching on each of the disciplines and bringing them all together. Everything I’m doing is working between disciplines. For instance, I’m collaborating with Bob Scalise [acting director of UB’s Anderson Gallery] on a Marlene McCarty show that will also have a component at Silo City, so Rick Smith [owner of Rigidized Metals and Silo City] and Josh Smith [Director of Ecology for Rigidized Metals] and his wife are collaborating with us. And from there it just keeps snowballing. And so it seems like there’s a little kernel out there. And that’s what it has been about so far. It’s picking up that kernel and seeing where it goes.
