How Two Passionate Dealers Revived the Market for a Roster of Lesser-Known American Artists
Co-founded by art dealers Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, Berry Campbell gallery has, in its decade of operations, carved out a reputation as a top-tier destination for work by overlooked artists of the American Postwar era, with a notable emphasis on the women of Abstract Expressionism. Both had amassed enviable museum pedigrees before crossing paths in a chance meeting in a secondary market gallery. From the outset, Berry and Campbell rooted their venture in meticulous archival research, a strategy that has enabled them to spotlight a roster of underappreciated artists whose institutional résumés belie their relative obscurity.
Their gamble has paid off: artists like Lynne Drexler, showcased in the gallery’s early days, are now commanding eye-popping prices at auction and headlining prestigious international art fairs. In 2022, the gallery’s expansion into a sprawling 9,000-square-foot Chelsea space—previously graced by art world luminaries Paula Cooper and Robert Miller—provided the perfect stage to present these artists in all their depth and complexity. The result? Museum-quality surveys enriched by painstakingly researched, exquisitely designed publications that further amplify artists’ voices.
Observer recently caught up with Berry and Campbell, two visionaries with a flair for rewriting art history, to better understand how they’ve courted success in a market that too often prizes spectacle over scholarship.
“It’s already eleven years that we have had this gallery, and we have known each other for even longer—time flies,” said Berry, smiling. “We’ve worked together for 17 years? Wow!” continues Campbell. Both seem somewhat surprised at how long and solid their partnership has been. Although women’s business relationships often outlast those of their male counterparts, the synchronicity and seamless complicity between Campbell and Berry—evident in the way they finish each other’s sentences and weave their thoughts together—makes it crystal clear why their partnership has endured for so long.
“We were always on the same page and liked the same artists; we defer to each in ways that complement each other,” said Berry.”I don’t want to be doing what she’s doing, and I don’t think she wants to do what I’m doing.” Campbell broke in to complete the thought: “We have the areas that overlap, like we both do sales.” Curation is another area of accord.
The two women first crossed paths at Ira Spanierman in New York, where they arrived after spending years in the museum sector: Campbell at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and Berry at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and the Whitney. In 2013, their shared vision and complementary backgrounds led them to take the leap and open their own gallery.
As it turns out, both women shared a deep passion for post-war art. “We were looking for post-war artists we could potentially represent, so we went to the Archives of American Art, which is online,” Campbell said. “From that, we pulled old gallery records from legendary dealers like Betty Parsons and Martha Jackson. We were looking at the artists who showed there or attended Skowhegan or other prestigious schools.” From here, Berry picked up the thread: “We circled all the names and started to research them. Most dealers would Google the name and see one bad image from auction houses, but we always went beyond that.”
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Deciding which overlooked artists were worth pursuing was only the first step, however. The real challenge lay in tracking down any surviving contact for the artist or their estate to kick off a project. They spent a lot of time going through old records—they’d even read artists’ obituaries to figure out who their sons and daughters were. From there, they relied on sites like WhitePages.com.
“We would first call to see if there was still a body of work,” said Berry. In the best-case scenario, they’d connect with someone who had loads of a particular artist’s works in storage. “They reply, ‘No one else ever cared about my mother’s work, please come!’ and we go check the pieces out in person.”
That hands-on approach, more akin to that of art historians than typical dealers, has served them well. Their willingness to roll up their sleeves and handle the research, cataloging and archiving themselves has given them unparalleled access to artists’ estates. More than that, “it helped us get to know the work inside and out and really develop a strategy for getting it out there to reintroduce it to the market,” said Campbell.
Berry called it a labor of love. They both would have been happy staying in the museum sector but like the fast-paced nature of gallery work. “It lets us do it all: conduct the research, be the art historians, put together the story but also keep things moving quickly.”
Being able to sell to the very museums where they once worked is a nice perk of the job. The rigor with which Berry and Campbell conduct their research—often piecing together biographies and CVs from scratch, reconstructing forgotten stories and thoughtfully presenting them in meticulously curated shows with high-quality catalogs and publications—quickly caught the attention of arts institutions across the country.
Not unrelatedly, their work coincided with a pivotal moment when institutions were urgently reevaluating their collections to address gender imbalances. “Ten years later, we see other galleries pulling our biographies offline, quoting the original research we did,” Campbell said. Museums regularly reach out to the pair to add their catalogs to their libraries. Strategic and highly personalized curation has also fueled their success. “Every artist is different—the formula that works for Berenice Bing might not work for Lynne Drexler.”
“For Yvonne Thomas, we started with a show of her works from the ’50s,” Berry said. “We sold everything, which laid the groundwork for the next show of lesser-known works from 1961 to 1963—which we did just because we loved it. Roberta Smith walked in and said she knew of Yvonne Thomas but had never seen these works before and was thrilled. She reviewed the show, and suddenly, those works became important.”
This meticulous process means it takes at least a few years before a new artist can be fully integrated into the gallery’s program. By the second or third show, the groundwork has been laid, and collectors are ready to engage with the artist’s work. “It’s a labor of love,” Campbell repeated.
Today, Berry Campbell gallery not only regularly places works with museums but also participates in major fairs across the U.S. and beyond. When we met with the duo just before the winter holidays, the gallery was wrapping up a major solo presentation of work by Nannette Carter. Next on the calendar is a solo presentation of Fred Wimberley, whose improvisational jazz-like abstractions organically blend spontaneity with deliberate decision-making. In March, the gallery will make its debut at Art Basel Hong Kong, introducing Japanese-American artist Emiko Nakano alongside other roster highlights already attracting interest in the region.
With so much of the gallery’s success tied to rediscovered abstract painters, we concluded the conversation by asking one of the most hotly debated questions in modern art: What defines great abstraction? “I think it’s the ability to communicate a feeling effectively—whether it’s detachment, emotional angst or joy through color,” Berry replied. “A good abstract work is pure and evokes a response—hopefully a good one.” Campbell chimed in: “It’s about combining all the elements: the right line, shape, color, and texture. If one thing is off—if the colors are wrong—it won’t take you to the next level. People we know who work in abstraction feel it’s almost a higher calling. They can paint and draw, but they’re striving for something grander. You have to respond to it.”