It was dreary. I mean really dreary,” gallerist Jack Shainman says of the loft, which occupies part of what was once a ballroom in an 1872 building near Madison Square that he and his artist-husband Carlos Vega bought a decade ago. The apartment hadn’t been inhabited for years and was filled with unclaimed furniture scattered around the dark musty space that retained the trimmings of ’80s living: gold-painted tin ceilings and pipes, ruddy natural brick walls, and, in one corner, a narrow spiral staircase that led to the primary bedroom with its uninviting brown hot tub.
“It was very unattractive,” Vega agrees, “but immediately the scale-“-2,057 square feet and 16-foot ceilings–“was the most exciting thing.” They wanted space, both for themselves and for their rotating art collection.
At the time of my visit, they are living with Emanoel Araújo’s Relevo, a monumental wall sculpture of polychrome wood, and, on another wall, El Anatsui’s Obscured Narrative, a tapestry composed of aluminum and copper wire that hangs opposite a 16th–century work, The Virgin and Child With Saint Anne, Saint John the Baptist, and Saint Sebastian. There’s Donald Judd furniture in the living room along with Arturo Hererra’s felt One Time (Orange) placed between the windows, looking as if it had blown in on a breeze and just -happened to attach on that spot.
Renaissance religious and royal paintings face off with the powerful beauty of portraits by Kerry James Marshall, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Barkley L. Hendricks, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The juxtapositions add to the impact of the collection that changes according to what Shainman and Vega decide to exhibit at any given time.
Collecting started early for Shainman, whose father was a professor at Williams College. He’d visit the Clark Art Institute where, he says, “as a kid, I especially liked the old paintings but mostly the famous Bouguereau, Nymphs and Satyr.” He adds, laughing, “It was titillating as a child. It was probably like porn, almost.” He started buying photographs from students at age 10 for $20 or $30. “I still have those. Some of them still look really good.”
Shainman opened a gallery in 1984 in Washington, D.C., with his then-partner, Claude Simard. An early show featured the work of a self-taught postal worker, John Robinson. “I found these paintings,” he says. “I mean we always love bringing something into the art world that wasn’t considered.” Nine years later, he sought out Kerry James Marshall and gave him his first exhibition in New York City, where Shainman had moved his gallery. In 2014, Shainman opened a 30,000-square-foot exhibition space, the School, in a former Kinderhook high school near his 235-acre farm upstate in Stuyvesant. This fall, he will open a new space in the landmarked, Tribeca-adjacent Clock Tower Building. (His Chelsea gallery will remain open.)
Vega grew up in Spain and North Africa before moving to the U.S. to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. He and Shainman have been together since 1995, often making a home in spaces tighter than this loft. “For years,” Vega says, “we lived in a very little apartment; 11 years at Eighth Avenue and 21st Street.”
“Although,” Shainman points out, “we actually had big art in there. It made it look bigger.”
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