Forty Years of This... Franklin Parrasch Gallery celebrates 40th anniversary with exhibition
Forrest Bess, Paint Table 1935. Oil on masonite, 12 3/4 x 13 in.
NEW YORK, NY.—
Forty Years of This… is a memoir of an ongoing effort. What began four decades ago as an improvised, underfunded, contrarian art venue experiment, remains just that. Responding to a 1986 classified ad in The Washington Post for a “gallery space” with “free rent in exchange for managing building” I swooped in on the offer, built out the roughly 400 square foot space, and immersed myself in a hard knocks lesson in hotel management. As it turned out, “The Gallery Hotel”, on the fringe of the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., was a “by the hour” hotel.
As if learning how to start and run a commercial gallery with absolutely no professional experience and no funding wasn’t enough of a trial by fire, tending to the dramas and traumas of The Gallery Hotel made the former task seem self-explanatory. I was exceptionally naïve in both industries but decided to see it through, at least for the gallery side of things. As blindly unprepared as I was, I perhaps did inadvertently forge a template for starting an art gallery with essentially no money.
A few months earlier, while still a graduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design, I saw a show of what I had thought was an installation piece, but was actually a group of individual furniture works by fellow graduate student Jonathan Benson. I immediately pivoted from photography grad student to gallery owner and set out to prove that the Studio Furniture movement was an adjacent and subversively evolved precursor to installation art. In this admittedly obscure pursuit, I had the ear, urging, and support of my most consequential mentor, philosopher and writer Arthur C. Danto.
As the gallery shifted from D.C. to New York in 1989, I set my focus on the shift of historical European and Asian decorative and applied art traditions to studio art practices filtering within the contemporary American Craft movement. Indulging my own obsessions with various theories of evolution – specifically group selection versus individual selection -- I centered on the American Craft movement as a symbol of dissent from hierarchical standards, and how skills migrate and ideas and intentions evolve. Despite resistance to the idea that craft and art should in any way mingle at all, the model grew. Sales became less rare, and curatorial and critical embrace of these positions became more acceptable.
While the gallery’s programming has continuously evolved, the constant has been its consideration of diverse evolutionary theories, a focused sensitivity to the migration of ideas, and a program guided by a conscious reflection upon the process of creativity as it relates to human evolution and migration.
After forty years of this, the hierarchical distinctions remain an ongoing enigma:
Art or Craft
Amateur or professional
Traditional or experimental
Self-taught or academically trained
Art Gallery or by the hour hotel…
- February 2026
