Rhona Hoffman is closing her gallery. But don’t count her out

Rhona Hoffman leans forward in her chair.

“I turned Rashid Johnson down when he was begging me to do a show,” she recalls, placing her hands on the table in front of her. “I was either busy or just stupid, because I didn’t understand the work. Sometimes things happen and you’re just not in the right place to do it. And then, looking back, you go, ‘Jesus, that was a lapse.’ ”

In her decades running her namesake gallery, Hoffman hasn’t had many such regrets. But today, Johnson — a Chicago native and graduate of the School of the Art Institute — is mid–meteoric rise and reaching stratospheric new heights with a career survey at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

It may have been a mistake, Hoffman reflects, but she wouldn’t necessarily have made a different decision. “He’s a lovely man,” she says of the conceptual artist, “but I still don’t understand the work.”

That signature bluntness and the clarity of her convictions have helped make Hoffman, who turns 91 next month, a gravitational force in the Chicago art world for five decades. Through her choices — some instinctual, others strategic — she has helped define what Chicago art looks like, as well as the city’s place within the broader contemporary art community.

“She has been a megaphone for the arts community globally and for our great city for 50 years,” says Tony Karman, who in 2011 relaunched EXPO Chicago, the city’s marquee art fair running through Sunday, with Hoffman’s help and support. “She’s one of a kind.”

Now, after 50 years steering Rhona Hoffman Gallery and helping build some of the city’s most prominent private art collections, Hoffman plans to shutter the space at the end of May.

One reason she has decided to close is the mounting cost of simply staying open. Gallery overhead has soared — rent, staffing, insurance — all while foot traffic has dwindled. “No one comes to the gallery anymore,” says Hoffman. The era when collectors and curators would stop by on Saturdays to shmooze and buy, she adds, feels long over.

Her decision also reflects broader shifts in the art market, where collectors increasingly buy through online platforms, art fairs and auctions rather than from brick-and-mortar galleries. Overall art sales are down globally too, falling 12% in 2024.

Then there’s the reality of just being a nonagenarian.

“This past year has been a physical awakening,” she reflects, referring to the toll aging can take on the body. “I’ve always thought I was bionic.”

The decision still wasn’t an easy one: “I feel sad. I’ve put in so many years of coming to work every day. I feel really bizarrely sad, but I’m going to do it anyway.”

A Gemini who likes both sides

On an early spring afternoon in March, Hoffman — her hair styled in her signature blunt bob, blue eyes bright against a cobalt jacket — sits surrounded by both her own history and that of the white walls around her.

In one corner hangs the poster for "Circus – The Caribbean Orange," a 1978 installation by Gordon Matta-Clark, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. For that piece, Matta-Clark cut large circular openings through the walls and floors of a three-story townhouse before it was renovated into gallery space for the MCA.

“What Gordon was doing was taking the darkness out of something and creating light,” reflects Hoffman, who met the New York-based Matta-Clark around the time of the commission and has represented him and his estate since. “And now I understand that that gesture can be translated into a vocabulary about freedom, about war, about anything where you might try to find lightness from darkness.”

Hoffman has always been drawn to works that balance the formal and emotional.

“I’m a Gemini,” she says, “so I like both sides.”

The minimalist Sol LeWitt, whose work Hoffman first showed in 1977, “managed to create art that can touch you without having it to be emotional. There was a sense of humanism in his work. He described the world not pictorially but diagrammatically.”

LeWitt, like many artists Hoffman has represented through the years, was also a dear friend. Even now, one of her prized possessions — sitting near the Matta-Clark poster — is a small cube sculpture by LeWitt, the artist’s first project with Multiples Inc., a company of famed gallerist and art publisher Marian Goodman.

Around that same time, Hoffman was introduced to photographer Cindy Sherman. Back then, Sherman’s "Untitled Film Stills" were priced at just $100 apiece. In those images, Hoffman saw something deep about womanhood, identity and performance.

“She was capturing the emotions of women,” she says. “Not to feel sorry for women, but to explain them.” (The same day Hoffman met Sherman, she was also introduced to Richard Prince, the photographer known for his appropriation of mass-media images like advertisements, celebrity photos and pulp fiction. She wasn’t impressed. “I turned down the Marlboro Man,” she says.)

Helping establish artists like LeWitt and Sherman has been an essential part of Hoffman’s career. It also helped cement Chicago as a place for forward-thinking artists and collectors. Over the years, Hoffman built on that legacy, giving art-world superstars — painters Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley, photographers Carrie Mae Weems and Dawoud Bey — early-career shows.

She worked closely with many of the city’s biggest collectors, including Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, whose extensive holdings of contemporary art (including several works by Sherman) culminated in a transformative $500 million gift to the Art Institute of Chicago. Hoffman also helped shape the collections of Judith Neisser, renowned minimalist collector, and Sandy and Jack Guthman, who gifted 50 photographs by women artists to the MCA Chicago in 2017, among many others.

A gallery closure that “leaves a huge hole”

More recently, in 2017, Hoffman discovered Nathaniel Mary Quinn during a visit to his tiny New York studio, where she was immediately blown away.

“The interpretation of those faces, the angst behind the head — it was breathtaking,” she recalls. “To be using pencil, pastel, oil paint, all in one canvas, and make it work, I thought it was genius.” She offered Quinn a show on the spot. Now, Quinn is represented by Gagosian, the behemoth international gallery that includes Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami — and Cindy Sherman and Sol LeWitt.

Hoffman’s curatorial eye has been a crucial part of the pipeline that has shaped Chicago as a launchpad of top shelf talent. But, says Monique Meloche, who worked as Hoffman’s director for two years before opening her own gallery, Hoffman doesn’t get credit.

“The big splash is when Kehinde has a show in New York, but the fact that Rhona was doing it first is pretty important,” says Meloche. “What she does in her gallery ends up in museums and fairs globally. But she probably doesn’t get the recognition she deserves because she’s a woman and because her gallery is in Chicago. You look at her legacy next to the world’s top-tier galleries and she’s got a seat at the table.”

Yet among those who know Hoffman’s track record, respect runs deep.

“She’s a visionary in the ways she sees potential in artists,” says multidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams, who joined Hoffman’s gallery in 2014. “There’s a certain level of respect and consideration that you’re given if people know you got your start with Rhona. She’s that person.”

That’s why, adds EXPO’s Karman, the closing of the gallery leaves a “huge hole in every way.” While younger dealers are emerging and the art ecosystem continues to evolve, it’s also the end of an era. “I don’t know how you replace a Rhona Hoffman,” Karman says.

Hoffman says she has no intention of “just sitting there and reading the newspaper.” She’ll certainly be the locus of many parties around the city’s international art fair, EXPO, where she’ll have a large booth this year. After that, she might lean into her work with Human Rights Watch. Maybe travel — Africa has long been on her list. Certainly, she’ll continue working in the art world, maybe as a visiting curator for one-off shows.

“I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up,” she muses, “but I’m not done.”