Garth Greenan’s Long Game: How the Dealer Is Redefining Artist Representation for the Future

In 15 years, dealer Garth Greenan has established a reputation not through headline-grabbing speculation on ultra-contemporary market darlings or glamorous openings, but by quietly developing a solid program that has grown alongside artists whose careers have become institutionally validated. The gallery is now a regular presence at major international fairs, and many of the artists on its roster—Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Emmi Whitehorse, Rosalyn Drexler, Cannupa Hanska Luger and Howardena Pindell among them—are fixtures in museum exhibitions and biennials. Greenan’s strategy has remained consistent over more than a decade: prioritize the quality and long-term value of artistic practice beyond passing trends and sustain it through careful research, long-term relationships and a deep commitment to artists.

Later this year, the gallery will relocate from its longtime Chelsea address to 10 Greene Street and 25 Greene Street in Soho. The new space in a landmarked, cast-iron façade building was designed by longtime gallery collaborator Stuart Basseches Architect together with Konstantinos Spiropoulos. Greenan is christening the combined 3,575 square feet of exhibition space with major solo shows by Rosalyn Drexler and Cannupa Hanska Luger.

Greenan did not set out to become an art dealer. Though he had only an undergraduate education and little formal training, he was passionate about art and drawn to researching in depth the artists he admired. “What has always interested me is paying attention to the things people aren’t paying attention to,” he tells Observer, adding that he basically “trained as an art historian” while admitting that the most formal academic thing he did was an undergraduate thesis on American painter Morris Louis.

Greenan compares his approach to walking into a record store—if everyone is gathered around the same album, he’ll wander in the opposite direction. It’s an impulse that even kept him from listening to the Rolling Stones, whose popularity he says once felt too overwhelming to approach with curiosity. He has always been drawn to the margins—in artists, scenes and communities that have not yet become the focus of consensus attention. “I’m still most interested in what people aren’t looking at but maybe should be. It’s not about setting trends—it’s just more fun to be part of the smaller subculture of people who are supporting that artist or that music before everyone else catches up.”

His path to gallerist began after meeting his former business partner, dealer Gary Snyder, whom he describes as “a lovely, lovely man” willing to take a chance on an unknown young upstart and his unconventional ideas. Together, they decided to focus on artists who were already historically significant but overlooked by the market. “I kept finding these historically significant artists who were hiding in plain sight, mostly in New York, and together we started re-presenting them to the art world,” Greenan recalls.

Among the early artists who joined the program were Nicholas Krushenick, Ralph Humphrey, Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Rosalyn Drexler and Paul Feeley—names firmly embedded in the evolution of postwar art, even if at the time they were not commanding much attention in the commercial market. From day one, Greenan made it his mission to reintroduce these artists to institutions, collectors and curators who had overlooked them despite their historical importance by reinserting them into the broader discourse. “It’s a bit like putting the wrong frame on a fantastic painting. If the frame is wrong enough, it can prevent you from seeing how strong the work actually is,” he says. “The work is so singular and so good, but the way it was being presented, especially in the early 2000s, often meant just looking at slides or digging through obscure, out-of-print monographs or, at best, expansive group exhibitions where its specificity was lost. It was hard to really consider a body of work that way. What these artists needed wasn’t rediscovery so much as re-presentation—presenting the work again so people could actually see it clearly.”

His interest in such figures stems in part from growing up in Washington, D.C., where he regularly visited the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Because the museum’s core collection reflected the period when Joseph Hirshhorn was actively collecting, its galleries consistently featured mid-century art. There, Greenan encountered artists like Allan D’Arcangelo, Nicholas Krushenick, Helen Frankenthaler, Rosalyn Drexler and Morris Louis. Their names stayed with him, and even then he found himself drawn to artists who were not as much at the center of contemporary conversations—particularly when it came to the market—as he felt they should have been.

Greenan opened his gallery in 2011, well before the broader market shift toward revisiting overlooked historical artists. At the time, he says, only a few dealers—including Alexander Gray—were seriously pursuing that approach. From the outset, Greenan understood that building a roster would require patience and genuine human connections. “When Gary Snyder and I started talking about this around 2009 and looking at spaces in early 2010, we immediately understood that it would have been a fool’s errand to try to sign big-name artists. We had no space and no real reputation,” he says. Instead, he decided to focus on what was achievable—what he describes as “polishing the diamonds on the ground.”

Many of the artists he began working with came through cold calls and word-of-mouth introductions. One of the first talents the gallery added was Nicholas Krushenick, an American abstract painter, collagist and printmaker often called the “father of Pop abstraction,” who developed a distinctively vibrant artistic language blending Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism and Color Field painting. Greenan approached his estate through what he describes as a “White Pages cold call” to Julia Krushenick, the artist’s widow and longtime steward of his legacy. “Julia became a dear friend and collaborator. She had done a successful show with Marianne Boesky earlier, but my pitch was that there wasn’t really a long-term plan for the work.” Here, Greenan points out how this often happens when artists are rediscovered: there is one big blockbuster exhibition of the best material but no follow-through.

He understood early on that meaningful institutional and market appreciation only develops over time, through sustained work building the right conditions and critical context. “From the beginning, I wanted to do the opposite and play the long game,” he says. “I’ve always looked at the whole artist and the entire body of work—that’s still how we approach things today.”

At that point, Greenan was still in his early twenties, and he believes his enthusiasm for artists from the 1960s and ’70s who had been considered not sufficiently “relevant” helped establish trust with families and estates. One introduction led to another. Howardena Pindell joined the roster in 2012 after another cold call prompted by a recommendation from Mara Loving of the Al Loving estate. Greenan emphasizes that the decision was not strategic but rooted in his long-standing interest in post-minimalism: Pindell was part of the small group of pioneering African American abstractionists, including Al Loving, Sam Gilliam, Jack Whitten, and Frank Bowling. Today Greenan shares Pindell’s representation with White Cube, which, following a major solo exhibition in Hong Kong last year, gave her a prime stage at Frieze London in October, pairing her cosmic abstractions of pointillist galaxies with the similarly spiritual and visionary work of Sara Flores and Marguerite Humeau. Growing institutional attention over the past years, culminating with the 2018 major survey “Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (which then toured to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Rose Art Museum), has anchored her rising market appreciation, with her most recent auction record reaching $1.63 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2023.

Over the years, Greenan began engaging with Native American artists, becoming not only one of the first galleries but also one of the most important galleries stewarding and championing their work in contemporary circuits while contextualizing it within the broader history of contemporary American art. As broader market attention began shifting toward artists of color, he realized that Native American artists remained significantly underrepresented in the New York gallery system. But rather than pursuing a category, he focused on individual artists whose work he believed was of the highest quality.

The first Indigenous artist to join Greenan’s roster was Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a pioneering Native American contemporary artist whose politically charged abstractions and collages fuse the modernist visual language of both Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism with Indigenous history, identity and a critique of colonial narratives. For years largely overlooked, her position within American modernism has only recently been fully recognized, with a series of museum exhibitions and acquisitions culminating in her major 2023 retrospective “Memory Map” at the Whitney—the first full retrospective of a Native American artist organized by the museum. Today, her paintings are sought after by collectors and institutions alike, regularly selling in the six-figure range.

Greenan first encountered her work as an undergraduate through the scholarship of his professor Bill Anthes, whose book Native Moderns examined the relationship between modernism and Native American artists, leaving a lasting imprint on how Greenan would later read and present these artists’ practices. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s first exhibition at Garth Greenan Gallery, “Making Medicine,” opened in April 2018, featuring some of her recent thickly impastoed mixed-media paintings, as well as two of her ambitious canoe-frame sculptures.

Introduced by another Native American artist, Athena LaTocha, a former student of Pindell, Smith became not only a starting point but also the person who persuaded and encouraged Greenan that it was appropriate for him to represent Native American artists. “She often said, ‘Wherever I go, I bring my community with me.’ So I started making calls again, just like at the beginning of the gallery,” Greenan recalls. “She introduced me to a broader community and encouraged me to pursue those relationships.” That eventually led him to begin working with artists such as Emmi Whitehorse and Cannupa Hanska Luger, well before their inclusion in a number of recent biennials around the world.

Today, Garth Greenan Gallery represents 35 artists, and he sees both that scale and the long-term commitment to those artists as essential to his approach to the gallery business. Rather than treating representation as a badge of prestige tied to a particular gallery, he believes the most meaningful relationships are those in which artists and galleries grow together over time: “The best relationships are the ones where the artist and the gallery grow together. Representation shouldn’t be about attaching someone’s name to a gallery’s reputation—it should be a mutually supportive exchange where both careers develop.”

After nearly two decades working in Chelsea, Greenan sees the move to Soho as a necessary new phase for the gallery. “I opened my first gallery in 2011 at 529 West 20th Street, and before that, I’d already been working in Chelsea since 2008. So I’ve basically spent almost 20 years there,” he says. “For this next chapter of the gallery, we need more space and the new location will let us do more ambitious programming—larger works, installation, new media—and also allow us to show two exhibitions at once, ideally in dialogue with each other.”

Greenan believes the goal should be integration—placing artists in conversation across generations and backgrounds while letting the quality of the work lead the discussion. These kinds of thoughtful juxtapositions, such as those he recently staged at Art Basel Miami Beach, can reveal formal and conceptual connections across artists who are rarely considered together. “Recently, I’ve been experimenting more with putting artists in conversation,” he explains. “When I showed Rosalyn Drexler next to Fritz Scholder, it revealed how visually and conceptually they have so much in common, even though people don’t usually think about them together. The same goes for Melissa Cody next to Nicholas Krushenick, or early Paul Feeley next to Emmi Whitehorse, or Alfred Jensen next to Howardena Pindell. That’s what an integrated program looks like. You start with the work, and then everything else follows.”

Moving forward, Greenan simply wants to focus on showing great work. “The art world has always been trend-driven, but lately it feels especially focused on categories and identity before the work itself,” he says. “Identity politics was important because it made people pay attention to artists who were underrepresented, but now I think the conversation has to move back toward the work itself.”

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