​​Without galleries — the point of entry for both artists and buyers — there would be no art market. But these businesses are also legendary for their lack of transparency. Information, especially about finances, seems opaque ​and secretive by design​.

​​With this in mind, we set out to learn the ​​basic mechanics of running a gallery in New York​ City circa 2023 ​— what it costs, for everything from rent to insurance to other, less ​anticipated ​​expenses​. New York was a natural area of focus, as it is home to more than 760 galleries with at least one paid employee; that’s 16 percent of all similar galleries in the U.S., more than any other city, according to a 2020 analysis by the art economist Clare McAndrew. While much attention in the press is ​​lavished on the handful of megagalleries routinely selling multimillion-dollar paintings, we focused on a group of art dealers with five or fewer full-time employees who are more representative of the small or midsize businesses that make up most of the industry.

1. Take the leap.

Opening a gallery is a bit like becoming an artist. If you’d be happy doing anything else, those with experience say, don’t do it. “It’s a goat rodeo every day,” says dealer Cristin Tierney, 52. “Good thing I love goats.”

Most dealers get into the game for a simple reason: They want to help build the careers of the artists they love and help other people fall in love with them, too. Along the way, they pick up a skill set that ranges from charming wealthy collectors by night to applying drywall by day.

The amount of start-up capital needed varies. ​After several years working at a Chelsea gallery, Rachel Uffner, 45, set out to open her own space in 2008. She sold art informally on the side and cobbled together about $125,000: a mix of small business loans, revenue from ​the​ sale of art ​​​​to a corporate collection, and $25,000 her parents had been saving for her wedding. Jasmin Tsou,​ 38,​ the founder of JTT gallery in Tribeca, started out in 2011 with a $2,000 loan from her former employer, ​the dealer Michele Maccarone.​ It was enough to pay for a tiny booth at an art fair, where she ended up selling more than 30 works.

2. Find a space.

Like any other business, galleries are all about who you know. Some dealers sublet their first space from a supporter or friend at well below market rate.

​​An artist offered to rent Tsou a 500-square-foot gallery on the Lower East Side for $3,000 a month as long as she agreed to clean out the trash that had piled up inside. “The trash was drywall, studs, paint, plaster — I used all of that to build the space out,” Tsou recalls. ​“If the universe had not opened every single door at every moment, I don’t know if I would have done it.”​ Other dealers hit the pavement for months in order to find that elusive mix of good bones, good vibes and a good price. “I must have looked at 40 spaces,” said Helena Anrather, ​36, ​who opened up shop in Chinatown in 2017.

These days, rents can be eye-watering. Jonathan Travis, a partner at Redwood Property Group, estimates that the average ground-floor gallery space in ​West ​Chelsea or TriBeCa costs around $100 per square foot. ​On the Upper East Side, rents can cost up to two or three times as much​, making it “the most expensive gallery district in the city,” Travis says​. ​(Prices for upper floors in the neighborhood are more comparable to those in Chelsea and TriBeCa.) ​The most affordable option for a dealer starting out in Manhattan is an upper floor in Chinatown, which could cost, at the lower end, $​5,000 ​​a month. But even that requires serious investment. A first-time business owner, Travis warns, should be prepared to put down a security deposit of as much as eight months’ rent, though that number too will vary depending on the neighborhood.

3. Build a roster of artists.

Often, dealers start out mounting shows of work by friends or acquaintances before looking farther afield. Open studio events, art-school graduate shows, Instagram, international biennials — all are frequent hunting grounds for new talent. Rachel Uffner met Curtis Talwst Santiago, a Canada-born, Munich-based artist who creates tiny dioramas inside jewelry boxes, while he was doing a residency at the art space Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. “We’re lucky in New York because a lot of people come to us,” Uffner says.

​​​The artist-gallery relationship is a bit like dating. Young artists might work with a number of art dealers casually — contributing a painting to a group show or art-fair booth, for example — before committing to something more serious, like a solo show. Only then might they agree to formal representation, in which a gallery becomes the artist’s official agent. ​​​“You have that status conversation — ‘What are we?’” Anrather says. “It’s important to be clear about one another’s goals.”

​​​​Galleries make introductions to curators and other influential art-world tastemakers, shape the career trajectories of the artists they represent and generally split sales proceeds 50-50. One or two highly successful artists can sometimes drive a large portion of a gallery’s profits, which makes it all the more stressful when a megagallery like Gagosian or David Zwirner — which offer considerably more resources and better infrastructure — woos them away. Still, smaller dealers may try to strike a deal to share representation. “At the end of the day, if David Zwirner or Hauser [& Wirth] comes to an artist I work with and says, ‘We’re going to have a show,’ what am I going to say? No?” asks the dealer Charlie Moffett, 38. “There is this tacit understanding that if a bigger gallery does offer them an opportunity, they would like to find a way to keep working together … but you can’t hold on too tight.”

4. Find your people.

A gallery is more than just the artists it represents — it’s also the community of​ people who keep the operation going. That cast includes art handlers (who get the art from place to place and install it safely), directors (who sell art to collectors and serve as the main point of contact for artists), registrars (who keep track of art as it travels from, say, gallery storage to a museum or to a collector’s home), and fabricators (who help artists with highly technical production). Anrather noted somewhat sheepishly that her director, Megan Yuan, started out as an unpaid intern; her role — and salary — grew alongside the business. (Yuan was sent over unannounced by a gallery in the neighborhood that had overestimated the number of interns it could accommodate that day.) The market rate for a director at a midsize gallery varies widely, according to dealers: between $60,000 and $120,000, plus perhaps a 10 percent ​commission on each work they sell, based on the gallery’s profit, or a bonus predicated on the gallery’s total annual revenue. ​​

5. Build your network of collectors.

It takes fewer collectors than one might think to keep a gallery afloat. “In any given year, you are selling a huge percentage of what you sell to a handful of people,” says Tierney, who founded her gallery in 2010. Some dealers can rely on a core group of a dozen or more supercollectors who consistently buy art from multiple exhibitions a year, and many more who make one or two purchases over the course of a decade. As Tierney put it: “I have had times where someone who I met at a panel discussion 10 years ago sends me an email out of nowhere and says, ‘How much is that?’”

6. Get your priorities straight.

Art dealers have to make decisions about where to spend and where to save. Rather than renting out a​n expensive​​ Chelsea restaurant for a post-opening soiree, which can cost more than $15,000, many young dealers opt to ​​​​celebrate ​their artists with beer and pizza at a nearby bar for less than $2,000. Few work with specialist PR firms, which can charge as much as $10,000 a month. Anrather turned the gallery’s defunct ​elevator shaft into “extremely compact storage” to minimize her off-site storage fees. Kendra Jayne Patrick, who founded her itinerant gallery in New York in 2018 and opened a brick-and-mortar space in Bern, Switzerland, last year, says she often takes advantage of certain European airlines’ generous luggage policies to cut down on art shipping costs, and uses those savings to fund complex installations.

Dealers say some things are still worth splurging on, like photography of every exhibition ($1,000 to $3,000 a pop). Several invest in catalogs, essays and scholarly research on gallery artists ($15,000 to $50,000 a year). Tierney sets money aside for travel to small cities where collectors and curators rarely get house calls ($20,000 a year). Moffett covers half of his qualifying artists’ health insurance; Polina Berlin, 38, who founded her Upper East Side gallery last year, fronts money for top-of-the-line materials. “I went to pick up handmade watercolors and ended up putting $2,500 worth of paint on my credit card,” she says. “My jaw dropped.”

7. Figure out your art fair strategy.

Art fairs are a necessary part of the gallery business: They drive anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of all revenue, according to dealers. If a gallery offers market-friendly material (which usually means attractive paintings), it can pocket more than $250,000 in just a few days (though travel, booth fees and other expenses can easily exceed $50,000).

Some small and midsize galleries are working to limit their reliance on fairs. The Bogotá, Colombia-based Instituto de Visión decided to open a location in New York in 2021 in part to increase international exposure for its artists, and to be more discerning about the number of fairs in which the gallery participates. Still, many businesses find them necessary, if not exactly desirable. “As someone put it to me recently, ‘With art fairs, the house always wins,’” Anrather says.

Other dealers have begun approaching fairs as vehicles for exposure rather than sales. “We pick one fair a year where we say, ‘This comes out of our PR and marketing budget,’” Tierney says. Last year her gallery presented a complex seven-channel installation by the video art pioneer Mary Lucier at the Frieze Masters fair in London. It didn’t fly off the shelf, but it raised the artist’s profile in a way an ad rarely does.

8. Expect the unexpected.​​

Dealers quickly learn that it’s important to leave some buffer in the budget. “Nobody sits you down and tells you about the fines,” Uffner says. ​“You get fined for stuff you didn’t even know you needed to do.” (For example, Gagosian Gallery was fined $4.28 million in 2016 for failing to properly administer New York sales tax on art shipped to and from the state.) Uffner’s gallery recently paid $7,000 to settle a lawsuit over its website, which a plaintiff claimed was not in compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Then there are other unforeseen costs, like the $5,000 she paid to ​​get an emergency replacement for the gallery’s hot water heater.​​

The patchy and unpredictable nature of the gallery business means that in order to be successful, you have to see the job as a calling. “I do this because I want to live in a world where people feel supported to make things,” Tsou says. “It’s a bizarre thing we do as humans, and also one of the most beautiful.” In a testament to the precarity of the business, shortly following this interview, JTT abruptly announced it was shutting down after 11 years.

What Does It Cost?

The gallery business can be extremely volatile. In a slow month, a dealer might be uncomfortably in the red; in a busy month, they might accrue enough revenue to cushion them for the rest of the quarter. And one sale could make the difference between a good month and a lousy one.

The below is a sample budget for a small-to-midsize gallery during a particularly busy month of sales. (Opening an exhibition and participating in an art fair in a four-week stretch is the exception rather than the rule, but both are included here to offer a broad cross-section of a gallery’s activities.) The figures are a composite sketch, reflecting an average of the numbers shared by the sources interviewed.

Shipping: $3,500
Storage: $2,500
Director’s salary: $10,000
Rent: $12,000
Art fair: $50,000
Opening dinner: $2,500
Exhibition photography: $2,000
Exhibition catalog: $5,000
Insurance: $3,500

Total Costs: $91,000
Total Monthly Revenue: $295,000
​​Total Profit: $204,000 ​​

“RESISTANCE IS FUTILE when you rely on rich people,” the artist Rachel Nelson tells me, smiling but not exactly joking. Before opening Secret Project Robot on Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg, Nelson and her partner, Erik Zajaceskowski, spent the last two decades cultivating a distinctly outsider status in the art world. They became serial starters, opening up new spaces to show art that could never quite be described as galleries. In the late 1990s, Zajaceskowski founded an underground D.I.Y. party venue called Mighty Robot. The live shows helped establish the Williamsburg alt scene of the early aughts (bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs had some of their first New York performances at Mighty Robot). Nelson and Zajaceskowski consider parties an art form in and of themselves, but also a way to show art. “Originally, we threw parties to encourage people to stay and look at the work,” Zajaceskowski tells me.

In 2020, during the pandemic, they began renovating the small house that would become Secret Project Robot. (Explaining the name, Nelson says, “It’s that old communist thing; the secret is we are the robots.”) Nelson learned plumbing by watching YouTube. On a rainy summer day when I pop in, I almost walk straight past it. The unimposing storefront has been converted from a garage and still bears the hallmarks of one; Nelson was out by the side entrance chatting with neighbors as their children played. As she shows me inside, Nelson points out the white painted walls and smattering of branded mugs bearing the gallery’s name. They are doing their best, she says with a laugh, to be a real gallery. “We’re slightly reformed rebels,” she adds, noting the rising rents across the city. “Our first 15 years, we were balking the system but, to be an artist, you can’t reject the art world.” When I’m there, Secret Project Robot is exhibiting pottery by Moklé Studio, the Brooklyn-based team of the ceramic artists Mokshini Godamunne and Moses Starr. Like the clay surrounding us, Nelson is also in the process of being molded into something new. “It’s hard to be a gallerist,” she says. “My impulse if someone says they like something is to say, ‘I really like it, too’, not ‘Let me give you their card.’”

Nelson’s comment reminded me of an anecdote that the artist and critic Irving Sandler shared with the writer Julie Martin. The Tanager was part of a cluster of artist-run spaces, cooperatively managed, that sprung up in the East Village in the 1950s and early ’60s. After a woman came in and bought a painting, Sandler says, he asked her name and where she would like the painting to be delivered. “She said, ‘I’m Mrs. Mellon,’” he recalls, “and so help me God, I said, ‘How do you spell that?’” Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, of the famous industrialist family, asked him to send the painting to the Museum of Modern Art. After that, Sandler tells Martin, “I knew that I would never be a dealer.”

In his 1954 essay “Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art,” the critic Harold Rosenberg attempts to paint for readers a picture of the new downtown art scene that had taken over the neighborhood’s storefronts. “Apart from the two pawnshops facing each other on the Third Avenue western corners, everything on 10th Street is one of a kind: a liquor store with a large ‘wino’ clientele; up another flight, a hotel workers’ employment agency; in a basement, a poolroom,” he writes, comparing it to other “rotting streets” in other major American cities: “Tenth Street is differentiated only by its encampment of artists.” The location was selected for convenience, close to where artists, at the time anyway, could afford to live (and thus quickly run over and sit in the gallery’s front of house if needed).

When the Tanager first opened in 1952 (in an old barbershop), the goal was not to become a commercial gallery. “The idea was to show what was going on,” the founding member Lois Dodd told Martin. Artist-run galleries were first and foremost geared toward visibility. The uptown galleries were showing mostly European art and little that was contemporary. In turn, the Tanager mounted exhibits featuring artists of the burgeoning New York School, including Willem de Kooning and Alex Katz. Tanager encouraged the artists it exhibited to keep prices affordable so that the work, and the new ideas they represented, could circulate. Artist-run galleries were rigorous spaces devoted to pushing the boundaries of the cultural establishment. At the artist-run Hansa Gallery, members were required to exhibit their own art, “to guarantee that the group membership shall be of active and productive artists and not of ‘riders’ whose principal motive for joining the group might be social,” as their bylaws state. Several other artist-run galleries soon sprung up in the area; and in 1957, the New York Times art critic Dore Ashton began including downtown galleries on her beat.

For these early artist-run galleries, the goal was ultimately to create an uptown market for downtown art. They were envisaged as interim fixes, stopgaps to introduce young and untested artists to major art buyers for as long as they could afford to keep doing so. By the 1960s, artist-run galleries became more experimental, interrogating the idea of not only the gallery but of the exhibition itself. They sought to foster experiences that could not be replicated, let alone sold. The critic Louis Menand notes that in her loft at 112 Chambers Street, Yoko Ono threw some of the contents of her fridge at a wall-mounted sheet of paper, then set it on fire, as a performance.

Many artist-run galleries of this era have since shuttered, chased out by high rents and the low morale that can come with them. However, the early 1970s saw the establishment of two major galleries that exist to this day: A.I.R. Gallery (founded in 1972 by 20 women) and Amos Eno Gallery (founded in 1974). They established cooperative spaces in SoHo, a part of the city then known for cheap rents and abandoned buildings. A.I.R. was named for the artist-in-residence placards that artists hung over their doorways in lofts that had only been zoned for manufacturing, so the fire department would know to rescue them if someone, say, set something on fire during a performance. José-Ricardo Presman, one of the founding members of Amos Eno, which eventually moved, in the general arc of New York bohemia, to Bushwick, Brooklyn, says he sometimes downplays the word “collective” when describing the gallery to people he meets in his day job. (“I’m in the jewelry business,” he tells me.) They tend to respond, he says, with some variation of, “What are you, a communist?”

That kind of radicalism is harder to come by these days, especially in a real estate market like New York City’s. Today, there are scant abandoned warehouses in SoHo or even Bushwick to occupy, and artist-run spaces are under threat of being squeezed out of the very scenes they helped shape. I spoke to a group of artists who run galleries, either themselves or collectively, about their determination to persist amid such circumstances, to continue defining, on their own terms, who and what deserves to be seen. Still, many told me that while they are in tension with the market, they cannot ignore it. Like so many of us, artists or not, they are figuring out how to sell without selling out.

THE LIMITS OF what commercial spaces were willing to take on was something that inspired the Nigerian-born artist Onyedika Chuke to also become a dealer. He is now the proprietor of Storage gallery in TriBeCa. Chuke started his career as a sculptor, he tells me, but found he kept running into the same problem. “I wasn’t making racially narrative sculpture.” Chuke, who arrived in the United States at 9, says, “I didn’t know I was Black until I came here.” He founded Storage in 2020 in the basement of a Chinatown restaurant. Though Storage is a commercial gallery, Chuke is attracted to art that is difficult to sell, for instance large sculptures by emerging artists or work that represents a shift in an established artist’s career. The first Storage show contained new works by Emory Douglas, the former minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, and paintings by Rick Lowe, better known for working with artists and nonprofit organizations to rehab dilapidated shotgun houses in Houston’s Third Ward. Chuke aspires to give artists the kind of creative freedom he lacked when he was up and coming. This is something bigger commercial galleries tend to shy away from, preferring that artists stick to their brand. “People want ketchup to always be red,” as he explains.

This is not to say that Chuke doesn’t understand the importance of money. In fact, he gets it better than most in the art world, having grown up poor. He sold 10 of Lowe’s paintings from that first exhibition in two months, and he is proud that his gallery has been profitable recently. (Next up will be a show of paintings by the Japanese-born painter Michiko Itatani.) Chuke, who graduated from Cooper Union, does not have the money of many of his gallery-owning peers, but “know-how and desire are resources, too,” he says. In 2022, he moved Storage into a light-filled loft in TriBeCa. When I arrive, the air-conditioner is out, so we go to the back corner where large industrial fans cool us off. Behind him is a small kitchen. “I wanted it to feel like a 1960s art studio,” he tells me. Chuke has had a hand in every part of making this space, but not necessarily by choice. He could not get a bank loan, a familiar scenario for Black entrepreneurs. He did the entire renovation himself, and many of his neighbors thought he was the janitor because he was always covered in dust. “I think janitors are interesting,” he says, “because they know where everything is.” Chuke often sees the advantages that can come with disadvantages, including his own. Many of the people who operate commercial galleries, he says, “could take more risks, but they weren’t raised to.”

In fact, some regard artist-run galleries as risky themselves, their proprietors too creative to be practical. “It’s trash,” Chuke tells me of this belief. That reaction is shared by Eric Hibit, a co-director of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery in Gowanus; “as if we were in a constant fugue state of emotional turmoil,” he says with a sigh, rolling his eyes. Ortega y Gasset Projects started in 2013 in Bushwick and is now collectively run as a nonprofit by eight artists of diverse backgrounds. Indeed, inclusion is something they all stress to me as central to how they understand their mission as an artist-run gallery; curation, they explain, gives them a chance to bring more voices into the art world. When I’m there in June, work by Angélica Maria Millán Lozano, a female artist from Colombia, and Aika Akhmetova, a nonbinary artist from Kazakhstan, are being exhibited. The gallery operates on a 60-40 artist-gallery split, but some artists who sell nothing are given an honorarium, which allows, explains the co-director Leeza Meksin, Ortega y Gasset to take risks, to show “installations, site-specific work” and — something all the artists nod at — “artists who do not already have a market.” That the curators, as artists, get it is fundamental, they feel, to establishing trust. The co-director Zahar Vaks recalls one night he stayed up until 3 a.m. helping an artist with an installation. “Artist to artist,” he remembers saying, “this video is going to get up there.”

Artists might trust other artists, but one of the gallerists I speak to says they still feel like artist-run galleries are not taken seriously by dealers. “Rich people believe other rich people about price,” this person tells me. Alex Paik, one of the founders of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, an artist-run gallery with locations in five cities, including New York, Philadelphia, and Greenville, S.C., echoes this thought. “Value in the art market is all smoke and mirrors,” he tells me by phone, “It’s all speculation. Picasso sells for hundreds of millions of dollars and I don’t think it’s 100,000 times better than the work I’m making. It’s hard for the art world to change because the Picassos and Koonses of the world have to stay important because a lot of peoples’ wealth depends on them staying important.”

Some artist-run galleries have taken any potential anxiety about seeming like a real gallery and thrown it out the window, like O’Flaherty’s in the East Village. The gallery received a lot of press attention after a 2022 group show where they accepted every submission. Someone submitted nothing and the gallery put it on a small pedestal. The two artist-owners are Jamian Juliano-Villani and Billy Grant. They are thoughtful and a little chaotic, asking me my shoe size the night before I’m scheduled to meet them. They give me a tour of their basement and as we make our way toward a walk-in fridge, I suddenly become overwhelmed with fear that “We Locked a New York Times Writer in Our Fridge” is about to be their next work of provocation. I instinctively say, “I’m not going in there!” and they laugh. A lot of people like to think their work or the work they show takes risks, but O’Flaherty’s risk taking jumps off the walls. They are not afraid to offend, and indeed, offensiveness is actually the subject of some of their shows, like “Getting Chippy With It” (2021). That exhibition juxtaposed Allen Jones’s series of seminude women being used as tables and chairs alongside so-called exotic snacks like Eurocrem, pemmican, the Whole Shebang Chips, Thai Miang Kham Lays and limited-edition Jones Soda from 1999. “We like to orbit an idea with another idea to find a middle point,” Grant says.

O’Flaherty’s disregard for corporate-style reputation management adds a different dimension to what it means to work outside of strictly commercial spaces. Yet everyone I speak to agrees that there is something ironic about artists, and artist-gallerists, being so enticed by risk when they, more than anyone, have so much to lose. As Paik tells me, even as many artists have lost the possibility of steady income through academia as adjunct-instructor gigs become the norm, they and the artist-run gallerists they work with are committed to pushing the limits of what should be exhibited. In other words, they are refusing to be told that there is no value to that which they value the most.

Back in Williamsburg, Nelson points out the wooden blocks her four-year-old son, Raul-Moon, plays with in their upstairs studio. The blocks are painted somewhat erratically. “Did he paint them himself?” I ask. We have just been talking about money and the art world, so Nelson sighs and says yes. “You’re like, ‘Don’t become an artist,” she says with a laugh, “but also, ‘Let’s go make some art.’”