Remembering Nina Freudenheim
by :
Colin Dabkowski
Published in May, 2020 in the early days of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Issue 3 of Cornelia was virtual only.
kc kratt, 2012
There are certain constants in Buffalo’s visual arts scene without which it would not seem itself.
One is the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, now closed for an indefinite period of construction. Another is Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, the great avant garde temple to artistic inquiry in times perpetually uncertain. Another was Nina Freudenheim, the place and the person, whose eponymous gallery on North Street has long served as the region’s most respected commercial gallery.
“Was.”
In the haze of this crisis, nothing seems quite like itself. Nothing seems constant. Still, the news in mid-April of Nina Freudenheim’s death at the age of 83 came as a devastating blow to artists and connoisseurs across the region. We had assumed, in the strange way art urges us to imagine impossible things, that Nina and her gallery would be here forever.
“Her death did not seem possible,” wrote former Burchfield Penney Art Center Director and Buffalo News Art Critic Anthony Bannon in a remembrance published in The News. “She had become such a presence, championing for 45 years the accomplishments of regional artists she set beside work created by the internationally respected.”
In my 12 or so years as The Buffalo News’ Arts Critic, it sometimes became overwhelming to keep tabs on the hundreds of organizations that deserved attention. Despite the joy of the task itself, the impossibility of producing what the community needed occasionally got to me and demanded a moment of calm and a reminder of the beauty and brilliance of the things and people I wrote about.
Almost invariably, in those moments, my thoughts turned to that small gallery on the ground floor of the Lenox Hotel on North Street, and to the regal, resolute woman whose name appeared on its black-painted door.
Nina could be found seated at her glass desk in the pristine back room that served as her office. I would pop in, always a little intimidated, have a look at the work on the walls — always thoughtfully installed, always emanating some peculiar strain of wonder — and slide into the back room. There, at her glass desk and next to cabinets filled with work by the artists in her stable, Nina would dispense some crystalline opinion on the last article I had written — whether about visual art, theater, or something off the beaten track.
I was always somewhat taken aback that she paid this amount of attention. But the arts were her life, and her insatiable curiosity about them is part of what made her into the region’s most respected commercial gallerist.
Not that Nina was always complementary. To the contrary, she held my feet to the fire on more than one occasion, asking why I had ignored this or that event and encouraging me, in a roundabout way, to take a crack at writing criticism at a time I didn’t feel I was ready. I wasn’t, but Nina knew a voice was needed and she knew how to go about making it happen.
She was keen about Buffalo's culture, sure of its strengths and weaknesses, and, toward the end of the time I knew her, unsparing in her criticism of the once-vibrant cultural journalism scene that was disintegrating around her and making her important work that much more difficult.
This was the role she served for many artists in this region and beyond: a keen observer with sharp taste and a knack for delivering criticism aimed at building rather than tearing down.
Kyle Butler, a Buffalo painter who has been represented by the gallery since 2011, praised Nina’s polite commitment to excellence.
“There’s ways in which you can make work and write about it that are functionally ambiguous, that leave it open-ended enough and don’t hold yourself accountable enough so you can kind of get away with putting out a lukewarm or half-formed idea and ultimately a half-formed artwork,” Butler said. “That was the kind of thing she wouldn’t necessarily just glad-hand and say, ok, well it’s in the ballpark, it’s good enough. She would differentiate and say this wasn’t quite as strong for this reason.”
This level of considered feedback, Butler said, “became part of my inner monologue to a degree, where I would say, you know, this is part of that class of artwork where it’s sufficient but it’s not necessarily the most excellent one that I’ve made.”
In this way, Nina pushed artists to be better, just as she pushed collectors and institutions to pay attention to the work on her walls and journalists or critics to aim higher in their own work.
In Nina’s small gallery, a quirky space flooded with light and unusual Victorian touches, I had some of the most transcendent moments of my career as a critic: the curated chaos of Kyle Butler’s 2013 body of work; the transportive, searching photography of John Pfahl (a longtime friend of Nina whose death from Covid-19 came as insult to injury); the searing, uncomfortable visions of Rodney Taylor; and the familiar strangeness of Joan Linder’s meticulous drawings.
Beyond that space, her influence lives on in the NFTA’s Metro stations, which she brilliantly curated in the early 1980s.
All of this — the opportunity to see artists at the top of their craft, the constant motivation to do better work, the connections that happened in that small gallery and the monumental artworks that dot the city’s subway stations — are important pieces of Nina’s legacy.
None of those pieces come close to occupying the chasm left by her absence, though. When we come out of our forced hibernation, we’ll emerge into a different place devoid of Nina’s intelligence, her unmatched taste and her preternatural grace. We’ll have to make do with the echoes.
Colin Dabkowski is a former arts critic at The Buffalo News and a future teacher of English.
