News

Photo: Michael Halsband

I had the pleasure to interview Christine Berry and Martha Campbell. Christine and Martha opened Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea in 2013 and have many parallels in their backgrounds and interests. Both studied art history in college and began their careers in the museum world, but mostly importantly both share a curatorial vision. Berry, from Geneseo, New York, graduated from Baylor University in Waco, Texas in 1992. Campbell, from Greenville in the Mississippi Delta, attended boarding school at Groton School in Massachusetts, and graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2006. Berry received a Master’s Degree in art history and criticism at the University of North Texas, along with a certification in museum studies and education. She worked at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, as Assistant Curator before moving to New York for a position at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Campbell went directly from college to a job at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. She then decided to explore the gallery world before pursuing a further degree in art history and was hired at age 24 as an associate director at Spanierman Modern in New York. “I loved everything about the gallery world, from curating exhibitions to rediscovering artists,” Campbell recalls. Spanierman Modern, which focused on mid-twentieth century abstraction and mid-career artists in the modernist tradition, was part of Spanierman Gallery, one of New York’s most prominent American art galleries since the 1960s. Berry, who moved from the public to the private sector in several roles, had come to Spanierman Gallery as associate director in 2003. Both art dealers developed a strong emphasis on research and networking with artists and scholars during their art world years. They decided to work together, opening Berry Campbell Gallery in 2013 in the heart of New York’s Chelsea art district, at 530 West 24th Street on the ground floor. The two recognized that they shared a curatorial vision based in “an understanding of art, history, languages, business, and people.” In 2015, the gallery expanded, doubling its size with an additional 2,000 square feet of exhibition space. Highlighting a selection of postwar and contemporary artists, the gallery fulfills an important gap in the art world, revealing a depth within American modernism that is just beginning to be understood, encompassing the many artists who were left behind due to race, gender, or geography"Š—"Šbeyond such legendary figures as Pollock and de Kooning. Since its inception, the gallery has been especially instrumental in giving women artists long overdue consideration, an effort that museums have only just begun to take up, such as in the 2016 traveling exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism curated by University of Denver professor Gwen F. Chanzit. This show featured work by Perle Fine and Judith Godwin, both represented by Berry Campbell, along with that of Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell.

Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us the story about what brought you both to this specific career path?

Martha Campbell: I’ve always loved art from as early as I can remember, but it never dawned on me that I could pursue art as a career path until college. When I entered Vanderbilt, I intended to major in Econ and get a job on Wall Street after college, however, I always tried to take as many Art History classes as I could. One day, as I was talking to my parents about my career after college, they said, “well you know you can major in art history and pursue it as a career.” They outlined that I could work in a museum or an art gallery and with this knowledge, I majored in Art History and upon graduation, decided that I would try out working at a museum and at a gallery to see which I liked better. After getting a job at the Phllips Collection in DC and working there for a year, I was offered a job at Spanierman Gallery in New York. I loved that in the gallery world, you could still do research on historical artists as well as interact with the public on a daily basis. Thus, as soon as I started working in the gallery world, I knew that this was the career path I wanted to pursue.

Christine Berry: My mother was a 5th grade teacher in rural Western New York state (where I grew up). One year as a Christmas gift, she brought home a huge coffee table book on Renoir. I was enamored as I turned every page"Š—"Šmemorized by these beautiful painted scenes and rosy-cheeked people. Just after Christmas, we traveled to Boston to visit my mom’s sister. Aunt Dot was painter (with a day job) and brought us to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. As we were working our way through the museum, we came on to the French Impressionism room, my heart skipped a beat as my eyes found the painting I had been starring in the book, Renoir’s “Dancing in the Country (Dance at Bouvigal, 1883).” It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen (and it was real!). I started to love art, and later realized it was something you could actually study. (Two college degrees, several museum jobs and now owning an art gallery; the coffee table book made a huge impact!)

Sag Harbor has known 92-year-old artist Frank Wimberley since the 1960s — but in New York, it’s time for a re-introduction, according to Berry Campbell Gallery, who will open a survey of the artist’s dynamic, multi-layered abstract paintings with a reception on Thursday, May 30, from 6 to 8 p.m.

“Over the course of a career that has lasted more than 50 years, Frank Wimberley has felt abstract painting to be a continuous adventure,” a press release said. “The artist is a well-known presence in the art scene on the East End of Long Island and an important figure in African-American art since the 1960s.”

Growing up in the New Jersey suburbs, Wimberley was drawn to art and music — interests supported by his mother, a ceramicist and pianist who involved him in her work, and his father, who gifted him a trumpet.

In 1945, after serving in the Army, he attended Howard University, where he studied painting with three of the most influential African-American artists of the mid-20^th century — James Amos Porter, James Lesesne Wells and Loïs Mailou Jones. There, he also immersed himself in jazz, listening to it and playing it himself, leading to long friendships with the likes of Miles Davis, Ron Carter and Wayne Shorter.

But after two years — and with the basics under his belt — Wimberley left, ready to teach himself. At first, he practiced ceramics, following in his mother’s footsteps and influenced by the tactile and sculptural pottery of Peter Voulkos.

“However, on discovering that Voulkos was also a painter, Wimberley realized that he did not need to be committed to one medium, and instead ‘could do several,’” a press release said. “In the 1950s, while living in Queens with his wife, Juanita, and son, Walden, he worked the night shift at a local post office. This freed him to paint and take care of Walden during the day, while Juanita was at work. The post office provided him ‘with money—and time,’ which he felt was ‘the most important thing.’”

Wandering Carol: Things to do in Chelsea, NYC

Visiting New York? Here’s an insiders’ guide to the best things to do in Chelsea NYC and its surroundings, with suggestions on where to go and what to do from two New York gallery owners.  

An Insider's Guide

To get an insider take on the best things to do in Chelsea, I went to the two powerhouses behind Berry Campbell Gallery, Christine Berry and Martha Campbell who have owned an art gallery on 24th Street for the last six years.

I was at Berry Campbell for the opening of my late father’s art show, William Perehudoff: Architect of Color, so I pestered and prodded them (in the nicest way possible, of course) for insider tips on the best restaurants, galleries and top things to do in the area. What I learned was that it’s easy to spend at least one day in Chelsea exploring.

Two Coats of Paint Selected Gallery Guide: May 2019

Willam Perehudoff: Architect of Color

Provincetown Art Association and Museum
Provincetown, Massachusetts
July 5 - September 1, 2019
Opening Reception July 12, 2019
8 - 10 pm  

More Information  

View Works by Stephen Pace

Video by Luxeport Intl: Luxury & Creativity In Media

47th Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse
May 2nd - May 30th
More Information

Berry Campbell collaborated with Robert Passal Interior Design and Daniel Kahan of Smith and Moore Architects as well as Sarah Bartholomew Design in the Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse, supplying works by Eric Dever, Perle Fine, and Stephen Pace.

Each year, celebrated interior designers transform a magnificent estate into an elegant exhibition of fine furnishings, art and technology. This all began in 1973 when several dedicated supporters of Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club launched the Kips Bay Decorator Show House in Manhattan to raise critical funds for much needed after school and enrichment programs for New York City children. For more than four decades, the show house has been a must-see event for thousands of design enthusiasts, renowned for sparking interior design trends throughout the world. In 2017, the show house expanded with a second location in Palm Beach, in partnership with Boys & Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County.

Three canvases hang as looming, watchful presences in New York-Centric, an exhibition at the Art Students League of New York curated by James Little: Al Loving’s stolid New Hexagon (1996), Dan Christensen’s Jarrito, (1997) and Ed Clark’s sensual and lugubrious X-form Untitled (Bastille Series) (1991). While these artists, and the others in the show, fulfill Karen Wilkin’s simple precept from her introduction to the catalogue—that their paintings make “color and the way it [is] applied the main carriers of emotion and meaning”—these works, many of them contemporary but emerging from specific artists’ practices forged in the ’60s, are evidence of a decisive break with modernist tradition. They were a rejection of existing standards of aesthetics, mirroring Pop Art’s rejection of appropriate subject matter but with a more visceral turn. Loving’s marbled blue triangle illusionistically juts out into the viewer’s space, a threatening machine of sharp edges and points, while Clark’s twisting torso-like abstraction mimics the enticement of corporeal flesh. This is color not behaving itself, expanding to overtake the more modernist and Ab-Ex sanctioned notions of “gesture,” “form,” and “mark” to become the main component of painterly composition. Color was accepted historically as a tool to illuminate emotion or psychological depth, but outliers such as William Blake, Hilma af Klint, and Johannes Itten, who foregrounded color as the main dynamo of expression, were relegated to the periphery and seen as overtaxing on taste or engaged in optical trickery. Emerging mid-century, most of the artists in New York-Centric refused to handle color gingerly, and while this novel approach is not overtly political, many of the artists are African-American and several are women, and this alternative approach to abstraction may have functioned to move the form away from exclusionary art historical traditions. 

The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) inducted three arts luminaries into its Hall of Fame during its annual benefit on April 11 at Capitale. The evening’s honorees were Sanford Biggers, a visual artist whose work speaks to current social, political, and economic happenings while examining the contexts that bore them; Karl Kellner, patron of the arts, Senior Partner, New York Office Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company, Inc., and a former NYFA Board Member; and Min Jin Lee, novelist of the best-selling books Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko(Grand Central Publishing, 2007 and 2017). The gala was Co-Chaired by Marc Jason and J. Wesley McDade, both members of NYFA’s Board of Trustees. The silent auction was Co-Chaired by Marjorie W. Martay, a NYFA Board Member, and Marjorie Croes Silverman, a NYFA Leadership Council Member.