If you’ve been to Chelsea, you know the drill: open the gallery door, see a busy assistant’s head peeking over the front desk, and proceed into the exhibition. There are a handful of other gallery-goers, and they’re all either looking down at their iPhones or holding them up to take pictures.
The project is the brainchild of four veteran New York art dealers: Derek Eller, Abby Messitte, Katharine Overgaard, and Franklin Parrasch. They all say the setting of Beacon—an hour and a half by train from New York City—lets them experiment in ways that would be impossible in Manhattan, where rents are at least three times as high.
It’s appealing to artists, too. The gallery’s inaugural show, “What a Long, Strange Trip” , will include works by Radcliffe Bailey, Brian Belott, Al Freeman, Julia Rommel, and Dorothea Tanning, among others., on July 23. It will be an expanded version of a project first staged at Anonymous Gallery in New York in which six dancers jumped, fell, and collapsed to a digitized rendition of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.
Parrasch and Overgaard hatched the idea for the gallery about a year ago; it occupies the former space of Parts and Labor, a collaborative project they operated with dealer Nicelle Beauchene between 2019 and 2021.