Gracie Mansion Gallery
Historic Site Name: Gracie Mansion Gallery (1982-2002)
Addresses:
1982: 432 East 9th Street, 15 St. Marks Place
1983-1984: 337 East 10th Street
1984-1989: 167 Avenue A
1989-1991: 532 Broadway
1993-2000: 54 St. Marks Place
2001-2002: 504 West 22nd Street
Gracie Mansion Gallery was one of the pivotal galleries in the East Village during its artistic heyday from 1982-2002. Like its sister gallery (and many say rival) Civilian Warfare Gallery, Gracie Mansion promoted and exhibited politically motivated art by queer and female artists such as David Wojnarowicz, Timothy Greathouse, Luis Frangella, Greer Lankton, and Peter Hujar.
“One could–and did–open a gallery with no money or art world connections. In fact, if I had known anything about business or the art world, I would never have opened. Thank God I was naive.”
-Gracie Mansion, New, Used & Improved: Art for the 1980’s
In a neighborhood full of eccentrics and accidental gallerists, Gracie Mansion still managed to stand out with a truly exceptional entrance into the art world. Born Joanne Mayhew, Gracie was an art student in New Jersey, where she was influenced by Fluxus member Al Hansen. His influence pushed her understanding of performance and the use of space, leading her to challenge the confines of how art was then currently shown. Like so many of her fellow gallerists, Gracie never intended to run a gallery or make a profession out of selling art in general; it was about having fun, throwing amazing openings, and pushing the agenda of her many artist friends.
Her first show, while she was a director at a Soho gallery, was in the back of a limo, showing and selling the work of her friend, Buster Cleveland. Parked on the corner of Spring and West Broadway, potential buyers would have to climb into the back and contort their bodies in order to view the collages. Her next (and more fateful) iteration came with the launch of the Loo Division in March 1982, when she showed the work of her friend Timothy Greathouse in the bathroom of the fifth-floor walkup at 432 East 9th Street.
Gracie’s experimentation with cramped spaces, many ironically synonymous with privacy (limos, bathrooms) allowed her to seamlessly fit into an art scene that made physicality a part of spectatorship, forcing viewers to endure discomfort in the process of consumption. The immediate and overwhelming success led to subsequent shows, opportunities Gracie turned into her first brick and mortar spaces.
Gracie opened her gallery at 337 East 10th Street with the promise of an investment from an attorney who met Gracie around the neighborhood, who agreed to pay her rent for a year. However, this miraculous act of generosity became unnecessary as the gallery was almost immediately profitable and self-sustaining. Why he decided, having no background in art or business, to make such an offer in an art gallery run by a relative stranger, he said, “I did it for grins and well, because I liked Gracie.”
Sur Rodney Sur, Gracie’s coworker from her time as a gallery assistant in Soho, joined as a partner in 1983, a partnership that lasted until 1989. Sur Rodney, a queer black man, had his own adventures in alternative art display, having had shows in an animal shelter, as well hosting a cable TV show (co-hosted by his dog, Niffty Nipper-pits). Sur Rodney also lent to the fledgling gallery a sense of calm and stability, a much-needed balance to Gracie’s magnetic but erratic impulses. Much like the seemingly opposites-attract partnership of Dean Savard and Alan Barrows of the Civilian Warfare Gallery, Gracie and Sur Rodney combined their differing yet equally productive talents to somehow defy financial logic and continue to show some of the most transformative art of the East Village.
As was the case at Civilian Warfare, David Wojnarowicz would prove to be Gracie Mansion’s most illustrious star. Wojnarowicz exhibited work at Gracie Mansion as early as 1982, when he contributed his ‘Hujar Dreaming’ to the gallery’s Famous Show, art work which ironically (and iconically) had to be hung on the ceiling due to the lack of space. He continued to show at Gracie Mansion throughout the 1980s and had both a solo show and group show at the gallery in 1987, including the foundational solo show Four Elements and the group show Art Against AIDS. Even though Wojnarowicz showed across dozens of galleries during his lifetime (and beyond) Gracie Mansion, along with Civilian Warfare, would be the gallery most associated with his prodigious body of work.
Wojnarowicz’s generosity was well-known, and he used his growing influence to insist that artists who were friends as well as colleagues were given exposure in his shows at Gracie Mansion (among others.) These collaborations would prove instrumental in launching these artists’ own careers, as many of them went on to become underground and art world stars.
These collaborators included Greer Lankton (long overdue in recognition as one of the most important queer artists of the second half of the 20th century), a colleague from Civilian Warfare and a venerable presence in the East Village art scene; Kiki Smith, who would become an art world titan but was still a struggling artist in 1983 when she worked with David of The Pier 34 Show; Judy Glantzman, another Civilian Warfare Gallery alumnus and collaborator on The Missing Children Show, commissioned for the Kentucky Child Victims' Trust Fund; and the photographer Peter Hujar, Wojnarowicz’s father figure-mentor who had not had a US-based show in five years until Gracie gave him one in 1986. It would be his last before he died of AIDS on November 26, 1987.
In 1987, Gracie Mansion Gallery joined the exodus of galleries out of the East Village. After moving to 167 Avenue A in March of 1984, she again moved but this time to Soho, settling at 532 Broadway, where she remained until 2002.
Sources:
Frank, Peter and McKenzie, Michael. New, Used & Improved: Art for the 1980’s. New York: Abbeville Press, 1987.
Carr, Cynthia. Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012.
Taylor, Marvin J., ed. The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Kamin, Diana, and Glenn Wharton. David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base Interview with Sur Rodney Sur. Interview conducted September 8, 2016.