Galleries have been moving to TriBeCa for a good five years, but the migration has finally hit critical mass. As everyone from tiny new project spaces to the blue-chip titan David Zwirner floods in, this cast-iron and cobblestone neighborhood in Manhattan — south of Canal, north of Vesey and west of Broadway — is no longer just one option of many. For any New York-area gallery that needs to move or is opening another branch, TriBeCa is now the most exciting place to show contemporary art — the destination that has to be considered.
There are now at least 41 galleries in TriBeCa, according to the real estate broker Jonathan Travis — who placed 22 of those himself — compared with fewer than 20 galleries two years ago, and still more are set to move in. It’s not just because a savvy real estate broker found a cache of dormant retail spaces, either. Rather, the neighborhood’s layout and architecture — an endearing mix of sudden broad vistas, quiet nooks and river views — offer the perfect compromise between the art world’s romantic 1960s conception of itself and its current professionalized reality.
Once the home of New York’s central wholesale food market, TriBeCa is full of the same kind of industrial warehouse buildings and creaky tongue-and-groove wooden floors that give SoHo so much of its character. When the market moved to the Bronx in the early ’60s, the neighborhood was left with a desolate appearance that lasted long enough for a star turn in “Ghostbusters, ” filmed two decades later outside Hook & Ladder Company 8 on North Moore Street. Still, 1980s TriBeCa was also magical, with air that often smelled of black pepper or roasting nuts, thanks to a few holdout wholesalers.
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Works by Milton Graves, the visionary drummer who died this year, at Artists Space. In his remarkable practice and worldview, art, medicine, plants, human perception, the nervous system and the cosmos are all connected.Credit... Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times
Exiting from Theta, at 184 Franklin Street, a gallery whose entrance is a basement vault hatch.Credit... An Rong Xu for The New York Times
Pop stars and hedge funders moved in next, and soon condo towers were sprouting from every available lot. The once-sleepy enclave has filled up with overpriced restaurants, over-loud mobile phone conversations and too many tiny dogs. But the large-scale arrival of the art world gives the neighborhood its first unifying theme in 60 years.
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What TriBeCa offers in exchange, apart from a brief window of affordable retail space, is a mixed-use ambience that provides art with a more lifelike context than it ever really gets in Chelsea. A painting simply looks different in a place where people live and work than it does on a windy block of nothing but galleries. Many of the people who’ve been living in TriBeCa the longest are also artists themselves, which makes for a particularly vibrant and engaged audience. “It’s real artists, ” said Pascal Spengemann, the co-owner of the year-old Broadway Gallery (and an expat of Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea). “Art lovers, people with an investment in the scene, curators. It’s been really great.”
Other recent arrivals include Chapter NY, a gallery that, after starting life in a tiny Chinatown space and a few years modestly situated at a mezzanine level on East Houston Street, finally has its first substantial footprint on Walker Street. “It’s incredible, ” says Nicole Russo, Chapter’s founder. “It’s busier than I’ve ever been on the Lower East Side. The combination of being a storefront and being on such a good block with so many great galleries has really paid off.”
The shift in attention downtown doesn’t mean Chelsea is over. Given the sheer number of art galleries still there, as well as the brand-new buildings erected by most of the neighborhood’s megadealers and the reopening of Dia Chelsea, “over” would be hard to imagine. And in a moment when canons of all sorts are toppling, and when notable art galleries have spread up the Hudson and from Miami to Los Angeles, it no longer makes sense to imagine a single center to the gallery scene, anyway. But even a diffuse scene has its hot spots.
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A geographical change also doesn’t imply more substantive changes, at least so far. Gallery programs have diversified somewhat in recent years, and so have their curatorial teams. But ownership in TriBeCa remains overwhelmingly white, as it is in Chelsea. What we can hope for is that as more spaces open for the very first time, we’ll start to see a difference.
We’ve divided the best of the shows that are currently open into three itineraries organized around the neighborhood’s most gallery-dense arteries: Walker Street, White Street and lower Broadway and Cortlandt Alley. Get a couple of Boccini cookies from Grandaisy Bakery at 250 West Broadway, take a few minutes in adjacent TriBeCa Park to admire the red brick majesty of the AT&T Building and the tide of oaken water towers receding north through SoHo, and use the following as a springboard to explore.
Walker Street, the artery that connects TriBeCa to Chinatown, is now the red-hot center of the center. The former Chelsea gallerist Josée Bienvenu’s new venture, Bienvenu Steinberg & Partners, and a new branch of David Lewis Gallery of the Lower East Side join many others just on the block between Church Street and Broadway. With the arrival of David Zwirner’s new kunsthalle-style space 52 Walker, led by Ebony L. Haynes, the street now has as much weight as Chelsea or the Upper East Side. On Lispenard, a block north, visit Denny Dimin, Canada and other galleries, stopping for an espresso at La Colombe, in a house that once hosted Frederick Douglass.
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“Kandis Williams: A Line, ” at the new 52 Walker, marks the entry of David Zwirner and Ebony L. Haynes to TriBeCa. Williams worked with Black dancers versed in ballet and modern dance.Credit... 52 Walker
Julien Ceccaldi’s “Haul From Hell” (2021), artist custom lightbox; layered plexiglass with digital prints, LED lights, at Lomex gallery.Credit... Julien Ceccaldi and Lomex
Gauri Gill’s show at James Cohan, which includes work from the “Acts of Appearance” series. The photographer invited Maharashtra villagers to create fantastically inventive masks.Credit... Gauri Gill and James Cohan
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The Delhi-based photographer Gauri Gill’s solo show in James Cohan’s new TriBeCa space is one of the most original and imaginative I’ve seen so far this season. It’s both contemplative and outgoing. Gill’s photography is often a collaborative enterprise, as is the case with two recent and continuing series excerpted in “A Time to Play: New Scenes from Acts of Appearance.”
For the earlier one, “Field of Sight, ” begun in 2013, she made large-scale, black-and-white photographs of barren-looking, low-horizon farmlands in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, not far from Mumbai. A single male figure is present in each picture, usually standing with his back to us as if gravely contemplating what’s in front of him. He is Rajesh Chaitya Vangad, a resident of the region and an artist specializing in a type of folk painting practiced by the Warli Indigenous group, often done on house walls and characterized by a vocabulary of nature-related symbols and figures.
In the photographs, Vangad’s art is also present “live.” At Gill’s invitation, he has covered the surface of each photograph, top to bottom, with networks of tiny, meticulously drawn figures suggesting humans, animals and divinities. Together, they depict scenes of everyday life with its pleasures and politics but also its stresses resulting from poverty, environmental degradation and, most recently and catastrophically, Covid-19. In a 2021 piece titled “The Great Pandemic, ” the landscape is half-obscured by a rain of tiny images of hospital beds, and towering over everything is the figure of the Earth Goddess, Dhartari Devi, ordinarily a source of beneficence, but here holding a symbol of the coronavirus menacingly in her hands.
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Gill’s “Untitled (69)” from “Acts of Appearance” (2015-ongoing). Her show is one of the most original and imaginative this season.Credit... Gauri Gill and James Cohan
Rural life is also the setting for the series of large-format color photographs called “Acts of Appearance, ” though in these the mood is, on the whole, antic and upbeat. Gill’s collaborators here are a group of Maharashtra villagers who, once a year, stage a three-day festival called Bohada, for which they create fantastically inventive, brightly painted papier-mâché masks. Traditionally the masks, made for performances, depict Hindu or tribal deities. But for the photographs, Gill asked the villagers, under the supervision of two master mask-makers, the brothers Subhas and Bhagvan Dharma Kadu, to expand their repertory to include fabulous animals, birds and insects as well as mechanical forms: clocks, cellphones, computers. They then shot the villagers wearing their creations while participating in the drama they know best: daily life.
The alternative universe that she and they have produced is visually spellbinding. And as the writer Hemant Sareen notes in an essay accompanying the show, their collaboration has an ethical dimension. Photography, when introduced to India by Europeans in the 19th century, was a tool of control, with
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