A Man and His Gallery

Art

Three years strong in his new space on Delancey, gallerist James Fuentes keeps the art coming

James Fuentes is a comeback kid. Eight years after changing times prompted him to close his small storefront gallery in SoHo, Fuentes returned with an edgy exhibition space for young and overlooked artists, deep in Chinatown. In 2010, there was yet another comeback (this time returning him to the neighborhood where he was born) when he opened an even bigger space on Delancey Street. In the years since, the James Fuentes Gallery, with its unusual program, has become an anchor of the Lower East Side art scene. “I’m drawn to voices that are overlooked in one way or another,” Fuentes says. “I’m drawn to artists who would be doing what they do regardless of whether or not there was a market for it.”

"I’m drawn to artists who would be doing what they do regardless of whether or not there was a market for it."

Fuentes decided early on in his career that emphasis would not be placed on artists’ academic credentials, nationalities or degree of current buzz. On a few occasions, he has shown older artists who, while successful, hadn’t had a presence in New York in years—Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, Swiss sculptor and filmmaker Roman Signer and minimalist sculptor Richard Nonas, who recently joined the Fuentes roster. At the same time, at art fairs around the world, he’s become the go-to guy for largely unknown fresh faces.

The Richard Nonas solo exhibit.

“The new movement is probably kids born between 1985 and 1990,” says Fuentes, “That’s what I’m looking at now.” Five of the six London-based artists in his current show, Pop Tarts, curated by Henry Kinman, are in that sphere. At Frieze New York, in the Focus section, he opted for three of the gallery’s artists (John McAllister, Jessica Dickinson and Noam Rappaport), who are a bit more seasoned.

Born on the LES in the late ’70s—not far from his Delancey Street space—to immigrant parents from Ecuador, Fuentes spent most of his early years hanging out at his father’s toy store on Clinton and Rivington Streets, while his mother was working in a factory. In his early teens, the family moved to the Bronx, where his father worked for the Transit Authority and his mother continued the toy business.
 

With little curiosity about art coming from family members, Fuentes gained his initial exposure to the creative side of NYC from graffiti. Keith Haring’s subway chalk drawings and Lee Quinones’ street murals were early influences—with one particular Quinones wall painting of a cartoon duck stating “Graffiti is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me” making a big impression, he says.
 

Fuentes interest in art blossomed at Bard College. He spent hours in the library and found ways to help out with the school’s evolving curatorial program. When artist Christopher Sperandio visited, he made Fuentes a character in one of his celebrated art comic books—one of Sperandio’s widely shown, collaborative projects with Simon Grennan.
 A week after graduation, he was working at Creative Time, and shortly thereafter, opened The Small Gallery—a 300-square-foot live/work space on Broome Street, in the former location of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. “It instantly democratized my notion of what a gallery should be; and it was already a destination, thanks to Gavin Brown and AC Projects, which was around the corner,” he says.

The upstart ran the gallery for a few years without really knowing what he was doing—along the way giving early shows to Cheyney Thompson, Amy Granat and Stephen G. Rhodes mixed with exhibitions of seasoned artists, including Jonas Mekas and Nat Finkelstein. When he finally shuttered the space, Fuentes landed a director’s position at Lombard Freid, a Chelsea gallery with an international stable of artists.

“I’m Not Pregnant,” by Lizzi Bougatsos at James Fuentes, 2012.

Simultaneously, Fuentes began developing a reality television show centered in the New York art world. A before-its-time precursor to Bravo’s Work of Art, ARTSTAR began with an open call in 2005 and culminated with a solo show for the winning artist, Bec Stupak, at Deitch Projects. Not broadcast widely enough in New York to make much of an impact, it did bring the talented young dealer to Jeffrey Deitch’s attention and he added him to the gallery’s growing team of directors.

"At the time, I could count the number of galleries on the LES on one hand, but everyone knew that the New Museum was about to open and the neighborhood would change."

The gallerist’s gig at Deitch Projects was short-lived. Out of work and losing his lease on his apartment, Fuentes started looking for a space for rent by an owner, which wouldn’t necessarily require a complex credit check. He happened upon a two-story building at St. James Place in the southern end of Chinatown for $2,500 a month.

 He had had no intention of opening another gallery. But given the combination of a seemingly lucky location, affordable price and a conversation two weeks earlier with seasoned gallerist Ronald Feldman, in which the elder dealer asked, “In an ideal world, what would you want to do?” Fuentes made the leap and rented the space. He lived upstairs and turned the ground floor into James Fuentes LLC—feeling not quite ready to call his new adventure a gallery.
 

“At the time, I could count the number of galleries on the LES on one hand, but everyone knew that the New Museum was about to open and the neighborhood would change,” Fuentes recalls. Starting a stable with a family of artists and friends, Fuentes decided to be experimental. It paid off.

Charles Saatchi and the Dikeou Collection bought works by Agathe Snow and the Zabludowicz Collection and Dakis Joannou acquired pieces by Brian Degraw. “I got right on the freeway, art fairs started happening right away and things never slowed down,” Fuentes says. He has become an active board member of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), and the gallery has exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze London, Frieze New York and other international fairs.

Fuentes does note, however, that while he started out as a dealer working primarily with sculpture, video and performance, his interest in painting has grown. Since moving to the larger space on Delancey Street, he’s added Joshua Abelow, Jonathan Allmaier and Benjamin Senior—the only artist in the gallery’s stable who was born after 1980.
 But, given the gallerist’s instincts on the rise of the current crop of 20-somethings, that’s likely to change, and fast.