4 F THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020As mega-galleries adapt in response to the
Covid-19 pandemic, they are shifting tactics
and schedules — and, in some cases, re-
arranging the locations of entire shows.
As a result, New York will get unexpected
visits from the works of two great painters
this fall. A showcase of new art by Jenny
Saville, originally planned for a spring
opening in the Gagosian gallery’s Hong
Kong space, will instead arrive in Manhat-
tan in November. And a canceled exhibition
of paintings by the late Jack Whitten, in-
tended for Hauser & Wirth’s Zurich branch
during Art Basel in June, will now be in-
stalled in the gallery’s new flagship space in
Chelsea in November.
“The situation in New York is extremely
fluid, and that could change our trajectory
and our plans, but we are prepared for that,”
said Andrew Fabricant, the chief operating
officer of Gagosian. He’s been working with
Ali Soufan, a risk strategist and former
F.B.I. agent, to help manage the safe re-
opening of the gallery’s branches.
The impact of the virus on the gallery’s
operations “has been enormous,” Mr. Fabri-
cant added. “We have suffered, but not to a
degree that’s going to really put us on our
back feet.”
During the pandemic, galleries every-
where have faced a striking decline in sales.
A recent report published by UBS and Art
Basel indicated that galleries in the top
bracket, with annual sales of more than $10
million, have incurred a 35 percent drop in
sales. Mr. Fabricant confirmed that the fig-
ure was roughly accurate for Gagosian,
while Marc Glimcher, president of Pace
Gallery, said the decline for his gallery had
been closer to 50 percent. “It’s hard, it’s
never been so hard,” he said. “But it’s mirac-
ulously not impossible.”
Pace is forging ahead with an ambitious
fall lineup that remains close to the gallery’s
pre-pandemic plans. (An exhibition of
paintings by Adrian Ghenie traveling from
Europe has been delayed by a few weeks, to
Nov 20.) “We basically said, the show must
go on,” Mr. Glimcher said. Galleries, he ex-
plained, are “one of the only parts of the art
world that can commence without a full
house. Every theater, every movie theater,
needs to be sold out. We can show the art
and sell it safely.”
The gallery’s fall slate of shows will in-
clude a presentation of work by the painter
Sam Gilliam, the first since Pace announced
representation of the artist. Gilliam, who
emerged in the ’60s with his painted canvas
drapes, will show new work inspired by
Black heroes like John Lewis, Beyoncé and
Serena Williams.
The logistical complexities of mounting
shows during a pandemic have, Mr. Glim-
cher admitted, been nightmarish. “All the
people in my logistics department are now
bald because they’ve pulled all their hair
out all summer,” he joked.
Other galleries have decided to forgo any
illusion of business as usual. Hauser &
Wirth — which, like Pace, recently opened a
large new space in Chelsea — was forced to
cancel a major group show that was set to
introduce the flagship in May. Rather than
trying to reschedule it, the gallery has co-
ordinated a group sale of donated works,
“Artists for New York,” to benefit imperiled
art nonprofits, available for viewing now
across the gallery’s two Manhattan spaces
and on its website.
“We couldn’t continue as if nothing had
happened,” said Marc Payot, co-president
of Hauser & Wirth. “We are trying to give
back to the institutions we care about,” heexplained, speaking of nonprofit spaces
that exhibited artists at the beginning of
their careers and that helped inform his
gallery’s direction over the 11 years it has
operated in New York.
The gallery also made several changes to
its programming to keep its own art and art-
ists physically close to collectors and audi-
ences; notably, rescheduling the Whitten
exhibition for New York and recently open-
ing — along with a handful of other high-end
galleries — a new gallery in the Hamptons.
The mega-galleries have also accelerated
their online offerings over the course of the
pandemic to mitigate disruptions to their
programming and the accompanying eco-
nomic distress.
During the height of the first wave in New
York, Gagosian began a series of focused
online sales of new work, branded “Artist
Spotlight,” to offer exposure to artists
whose shows were canceled. “It was meant
to bridge the gap, keep things warm, keep
the lights on,” said Sam Orlofsky, a director
at the gallery. Strong online sales in recent
months at galleries and auction houses
have encouraged them to continue the se-
ries. Upcoming iterations of the Spotlight
series will be dedicated to the work ofTakashi Murakami, John Currin and Na-
thaniel Mary Quinn.
The David Zwirner gallery has been
streaming exhibitions staged in remote lo-
cations via its website. Since Oct. 14, the
gallery has shown a livestream of the artist
Diana Thater’s new light and audio installa-
tion, “Yes, there will be singing,” 24 hours a
day from a location in Los Angeles. A medi-
tation on isolation, the installation features
the song of a whale that has been called “the
loneliest whale in the world” because of its
peculiar vocalizations.
As the galleries shift and adapt to a cul-
tural landscape undergoing a transforma-
tion, audiences should not expect major,museum-quality shows in Chelsea soon.
“There are things that aren’t possible,” said
Mr. Glimcher, “like doing incredible mu-
seum-loan shows.” Pace has pushed any
such presentations to at least May 2021.
Hauser & Wirth has similarly delayed a
historical exhibition of work by Erna Rosen-
stein, a 20th-century Polish artist, which
had been four years in the making and
which depends on loaned art from several
museums in Eastern Europe.
“The beginning of next year is not going
to be the year where we do large historic
shows with loans from all over the world,”
Mr. Payot said. As for those shows, “we
can’t do anything else but wait.”By TESS THACKARAClockwise from upper
left, Jenny Saville’s
“Virtual,” 2020;
“Heroines, Beyoncé,
Serena and Althea,” 2020
by Sam Gilliam; and
“Mask III: For The
Children of Dunblane,
Scotland,” 1996 by Jack
Whitten are all coming to
Manhattan in November.A Season of Upended Exhibitions
Dealers in Manhattan scramble to
bring the art to the audience.
“The situation in New York is
extremely fluid,” said Andrew
Fabricant of the Gagosian.JENNY SAVILLE/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK, VIA DACS,
LONDON; GAGOSIANSAM GILLIAM/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK; PACE GALLERYJACK WHITTEN ESTATE AND HAUSER & WIRTH; DAN BRADICAThe Barnes Foundation’s new exhibition of
wood carvings and other works by Elijah
Pierce has been in the planning stages for
almost two years, but arriving in late 2020,
it has a particular political resonance.
In the exhibition’s catalog, Thom Collins,
the executive director of the Barnes, said
the Philadelphia museum sought “not to re-
paint Pierce as an activist, a term he would
likely reject, but to present his aesthetic
themes and philosophical concerns as ones
that were, and are, vital and relevant. Like
that of any great artist, Pierce’s body of
work invites deep reflection. His wood carv-
ings compel us to consider the complexities
of what it means to be alive and to bear wit-
ness to our present moment.”
Zoé Whitley, director of the Chisenhale
Gallery in London and the Pierce exhibi-
tion's co-curator, said she was “constantly
impressed” with Mr. Pierce’s wit. The
Barnes features over 100 works he made
from 1923 to 1979 and — for an artist whose
most recent piece in this exhibit was creat-
ed over 40 years ago — “he really had a su-
perlative ability to make comments about
current events,” Dr. Whitley said. “He was
an artist profoundly connected to the
world.”
Born the son of an enslaved man on a
farm in Baldwyn, Miss., in 1892, Mr. Pierce
moved north in 1919 during the Great Mi-
gration. He eventually became a preacher
and barber in Columbus, Ohio, opening a
barbershop in 1954, which became a social
hub and a studio and gallery for his work.
Mr. Pierce died in 1984, two years after re-
ceiving a National Heritage Fellowship for
lifetime achievement from the National En-
dowment for the Arts.
Mr. Pierce’s wood carvings often featured
American presidents, including George
Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Richard
Nixon, Jimmy Carter and John F. Kennedy.
Most were depicted positively, though his
1975 piece ““Nixon Being Driven from the
White House” features the president being
chased, according to the Barnes, possibly
by the Washington Post reporters Carl
Bernstein and Bob Woodward.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also
was a frequent subject; in the exhibition, he
is the central figure of “Love (Martin Lu-
ther King, Jr.),” a work from 1968, in which
he is seated next to a sign that says “Love,”
protected by an angel with outstretched
arms. He is also one of three figures in
“Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Kennedy
Brothers” (1977); they sit in front of a red,
white and blue striped background, be-
neath three gold stars.
Mr. Pierce’s subjects were not always
secular. One of the most striking works in
the exhibition is his seven-panel “The Book
of Wood,” which is part of the collection of
the Columbus Museum of Art. The piece de-
picts biblical scenes, including the Nativity;
the flight into Egypt; the entry into Jerusa-
lem; and an angel at Christ’s empty tomb.
According to the Barnes Foundation, a
1939 newspaper article says that Mr. Pierce
made the “The Book of Wood” after his busi-
ness was “cut through by the devastating
effect of the Depression.” The museum said
that Mr. Pierce’s wife, Cornelia, came up
with the idea for the “The Book of Wood”
and helped paint its pages. The couple trav-
eled around the country exhibiting the work
and requesting donations to see it; Mr.
Pierce also preached. He later kept the
work in his barbershop, turning its pages
for his clients to discuss the stories they il-
lustrate.
Sheldon Bonovitz, a Philadelphia lawyer,
is a trustee of the Barnes and a collector of
outsider art with his wife, Jill, a sculptor.
The couple lent the exhibition 16 works by
Mr. Pierce, including “Love (Martin Luther
King, Jr.),” and their foundation underwrote
its catalog.
Mr. Bonovitz said Mr. Pierce’s “extraordi-
nary range of subject matter, brilliance in
composition and carving, and very direct
presentation” were what appeal to him,
adding, “What you see is what you get.”
Given Mr. Pierce’s subject matter and his
approach, an exhibition in 2020 couldn’t be
more timely. “He was a person who had a
deep political consciousness and keen polit-
ical awareness, and was also a pacifist and
deeply religious,” Mr. Bonovitz said. “He
speaks very much to contemporary times.”
Mr. Collins called the exhibition espe-
cially meaningful, characterizing Dr. Albert
C. Barnes, the museum’s founder and an in-
ventor of Argyrol, an antiseptic, as “a fierce
advocate for the civil rights of African-
Americans, women and the economically
marginalized.”
While the museum’s permanent col-
lection contains canvases by formally
trained artists such as Henri Matisse, Pablo
Picasso and Paul Cézanne, it also exhibits
artists with little or no formal training, such
as Paul Gauguin, Horace Pippin and Henri
Rousseau. All are displayed alongside
household items such as wrought-iron ob-
jects and furniture, thus “overturning tradi-
tional hierarchies to reveal universal ele-
ments of human expression,” noted Dr.Whitley and Nancy Ireson, the museum’s
chief curator and the exhibition co-curator.
For Mr. Pierce, the journey to institu-
tional recognition has been a long but
steady one, as his work has found a succes-
sion of diligent champions.
Carolyn Allport, a Los Angeles-based
teaching artist in theater and performance,
was introduced to Mr. Pierce’s work as a
graduate student at The Ohio State Univer-
sity in Columbus in 1971.
She joined the education department of
the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts (forerun-
ner of the Columbus Museum of Art) in 1972
and convinced the museum’s leadership to
let her curate what became the first major
exhibition of Mr. Pierce’s work, in 1973. She
later made two films about the artist, whomshe describes as her “mentor, inspiration
and friend” as well as being the godfather of
one of her sons, in 1974 and 1980. The films
are being shown on a TV screen in the exhi-
bition.
Noting that Mr. Pierce’s authenticity ap-
pealed to her, Ms. Allport commended him
for persisting through so many challenges.
“He took the carving he loved doing and
made his pastime into something more,”
she said. “His carving was a testament to
his faith.”
“The older I get, the more I realize how
incredible he was,” Ms. Allport said, adding
that she hoped the Barnes exhibition would
introduce young people of color to the artist
and inspire them, as he did her.By JANE L. LEVERE“Watergate” by Elijah
Pierce. Many of his
woodcarvings are being
shown at the Barnes
Foundation in
Philadelphia until early
January. In 1919, Mr.
Pierce left Mississippi
during the Great
Migration and eventually
settled in Columbus,
Ohio, where he ran a
barbershop.Woodcarver in a Timely Spotlight
The political and religious themes of
Elijah Pierce still feel relevant.
VIA COLUMBUS MUSEUM OF ART, OHIO.