A Major Gallery Opens in SoHo
I had to catch my breath, when I read Marc Payot, Hauser & Wirth president’s words in an ARTnews interview. He said that Hauser and Wirth was not looking for a space in SoHo when they decided to open a new gallery there at 134 Wooster Street but that, “We have a tendency to go to places where others don’t go. SoHo is definitely not the place where galleries are — there are really only very few.”
It broke my heart. Was he really talking about SoHo, my SoHo, the neighborhood that I had co-written a book about its history — Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street and the Evolution of SoHo, with my architect husband Shael Shapiro, a neighborhood which once had over 400 galleries and according to online statistics was one of the world’s great contemporary art centers. It was to be Hauser & Wirth’s third space in New York City, following Chelsea and the Upper East Side, to be followed by Artfarm, a restaurant located across the street from the Wooster Street gallery at 130 Prince Street.
Unlike their other art makeovers, the new Wooster Street gallery was not to be transformed but rather was to keep its raw trucking space identity. Vast. Open. White, with a rolling metal front door for trucks to enter. A vivid contrast to the brick and cast iron buildings that lined both sides of the block nearby.
In the 1970s, when SoHo residents, mostly artists, walked down Wooster Street between Houston and Prince, they passed it by, a single story industrial building occupied by the JARR FUEL Company. It dated back to 1920 when it was constructed as a truck garage-a huge space of 4,000 square feet with 16-and-a-half foot ceilings.
Although the neighborhood was hardly residential at that time, the art district had already begun to appear with the Paula Cooper Gallery opening on Prince Street in 1968, and with other galleries soon following in 420 West Broadway including Ileanna Sonnabend, Andre Emmerich, and Leo Castelli. Dealer Heiner Friedrich opened his gallery in the 1970s at 141 Wooster and, of course, on the corner of Prince and Wooster was the iconic artist-run restaurant FOOD, founded by Gordon Matta-Clark, Caroline Goodden and Tina Girouard. We all hung out and ate there.
But rents rose and things changed quickly. By the mid-1990’s, galleries moved uptown to Chelsea, stripping SoHo of its street-level artistic identity. While many of the artists still lived and worked in their studios upstairs, the ground-floor spaces became occupied by retail stores, increasingly resembling many that could be found uptown on Madison Avenue: Gucci, Pucci, and Prada.
Tourists walking through SoHo shopped at Uniqlo and H&M and less expensive chain stores on Broadway; those from abroad with money slipped discretely into Chanel.
So it was with great joy that I discovered that the SoHo Hauser & Wirth gallery was showing the new Cindy Sherman exhibit (January 18-March 16). The building still bore the JARR FUEL sign and the space was very much the same. There was no wall signage by the art. Just self-portraits of Cindy, with layers of pancake makeup, some hand colored, some collaged, and some hand cut. How wonderful. An art gallery instead of another furniture, eyeglass or sneaker store. And a gallery showing an artist whose identity fit well with the avant-garde art that had made SoHo famous in the 1970s.
While many new galleries had been opening in Tribeca in 2021–2024 below Canal Street, SoHo had not seen such a revival and the Sherman show, displaying new work, was particularly poignant. Despite its theme of aging, aided by digital manipulation, perhaps it is a sign that artistic SoHo is being reborn.
