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Downtown Dealers: Featuring Alexander Gray, Lauren Wittels, and David Pagliarulo

March 20, 2025

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Downtown Dealers: Featuring Alexander Gray, Lauren Wittels, and David Pagliarulo - Features - Independent Art Fair

Photography by Jackie Molloy

On March 5th, during a collegial evening at Alexander Gray Associates in Tribeca, a cross-generational panel of leading gallerists discussed the pressing questions facing dealers today. In conversation with Independent’s founder Elizabeth Dee, Alexander Gray, David Pagliarulo, and Lauren Wittels spoke frankly about what it means to show up for their audiences, colleagues and collectors. Surrounded by the work of the historic gallerist, artist, and visionary Betty Parsons, the panel reflected on what goes into the cultivation of their communities, the value of reaching out to art circles beyond New York, and the urgent need to advocate for artists as avatars of free expression. Their discussion, which has been edited below for brevity and clarity, offers a view into the pressures and possibilities shaping the New York art world today.

Elizabeth Dee: One of the topics the gallerists would like to address today is this notion of showing up. Some of us just came back from Los Angeles, which brought forward this question. What do we want from our audiences and what kind of engagement feels like quality now? And what are the questions and concerns around that?

Lauren Wittels: I have a very specific strategy about showing up. I will go anywhere that's not New York. I have been to every contiguous state in this country, with the exception of four, almost exclusively for work. I show up in Des Moines, in Columbus, in Indianapolis, Lexington, you name it. I'm the one person in the gallery that has really taken this on as an ambassador to advocate for our artists and to cultivate new audiences. 

When you go to Des Moines for the day, you don't just meet with the director of the museum and the chief curator, they also take you to lunch with the head of the board. And then you go to their house and you see their collection. Then you come back to New York and you make offers and you start conversations. Some of these conversations go on for years. It's really valuable and it has expanded our audience in a beautiful way. At the same time, it lends a real air of generosity and friendliness to the gallery. People used to say to me, when I was in Chicago, “Why are you here?” Now they say, “You're coming to my birthday party, right?” That is one way that we as art people in New York City, where we think we all know each other and we know everyone that matters, can expand our horizons for the benefit of our artists.

David Pagliarulo: My gallery's been open for almost a year now, so showing up for me is about the gallery creating an audience and a community around itself. Art is an in-person experience, it's something you have to show up to in order to engage with it completely. And that's something you can't replicate. 

Downtown Dealers: Featuring Alexander Gray, Lauren Wittels, and David Pagliarulo - Features - Independent Art Fair

Alexander Gray, photography by Jackie Molloy

Alexander Gray: Showing up is the center of everything that we do at the gallery. It starts with the artists for us: listening to their ambitions and their resentments and their dreams of what they need—time, space, whatever it is. We do the same, of course, with our clients.This is an active part of what we do with our team, including showing up every summer for a full staff three-day offsite retreat to look at what we're doing and listen to each other. 

With LA, showing up was a critical thing, and I found myself enraged speaking with mostly New Yorkers who said, “It's outrageous, it's inappropriate to show up.” And I said, “Have you talked to anybody in LA? Are you listening to what the needs are there?” Because this New York-centric thing is one of the deepest problems with the art world at large. 

Lauren Wittels: I have to interrupt you, because I was one of those people that said, “I can't believe they’re doing this fair.” And then I read an interview with Alex, and I thought, “Oh my God, I've totally gotten it wrong.” I was misguided and you showed me the light, so thank you.

Alexander Gray: This is the power of convening, and we have very few mechanisms for that. The art fair is the most efficient one, maybe, and in LA we saw the best part of what convening can do, which is showing up for people who we have kinship with, who we are in community with, in a way that would just be impossible without that framework. 

Elizabeth Dee: It used to be that [the gallery space] was the place of convening on a Saturday. People would come in and collectors would want to pull out every monograph and things out of the back room and fight and debate whether these things were worthy of our attention. Something that my colleague Matthew Higgs talks about a lot is this idea of where the consensus is happening with regard to value. The audience coming into these curatorial spaces was critical to that conversation taking place. Before that, it was the salon. It was an ideal, intellectually engaged kind of critical thinking. Now, arguably, the art fair has replaced the salon because we have time poverty. People are busy and more mobile. In a way, the fair is that place where people will show up. But, is it happening with the same quality now that it did back then, or are there new qualities for us to continue developing?

Downtown Dealers: Featuring Alexander Gray, Lauren Wittels, and David Pagliarulo - Features - Independent Art Fair

Lauren Wittels, photography by Jackie Molloy

Lauren Wittels: Time is a huge element in this. When I was at Luhring Augustine originally, back in the 90s, there was no internet. You wouldn't photograph anything until it was in the gallery. And then you would get these slides, which would take a week, and you'd label them with your typewriter and cry and you'd hand write things. It was a nightmare. Then you’d shove them into envelopes and mail them into the world and then someone would get the envelope a week later and would come and see the piece two weeks after that. That whole process is geared towards thought and care and slowness. Compared to now, when you shoot everything digitally in the studio, send out PDFs before the show is even installed or stick the work on Instagram and people snap it up there. Actually, right now, nobody's snapping up anything, I just want to be clear. But conceptually, where's the thought in that? 

My colleague Sasha Helinski and I curated a photo show in April that Gonzalo [Reyes Rodriguez] was in, one of David's artists. And let me tell you, that gallery was packed every Saturday, right from 10AM to 6PM. Hordes of people. We still aren't sure exactly why. We made new clients, we were constantly on the floor talking to people all day long. It was like the old days, it was great, I loved it. So it still happens.

David Pagliarulo: I think a lot about the translation of care in this situation because it is an attention economy. You have to be able to translate how much you care about this artist to a person with no time. It would be nice if it returned to the old days where you could be more slow about it, but we have to work within the system that we're in at the moment.

Elizabeth Dee: David, if Jerry Speyer walked into your gallery, are you in the back in Zoom calls where you wouldn't even be able to come out?

David Pagliarulo: I’m at the front desk. 

Elizabeth Dee: Okay, good. Alex, you have eight meetings a day. The idea that you would drop everything and walk out when someone really valuable comes through that you can connect with on a show is a tricky thing, no?

Alexander Gray: Yeah, it is. And our experience in Tribeca for the past year has been night and day in terms of engaging and being of service to the people who show up. We're still in shock that on a Saturday in January, we'll have 200 people come through. In Chelsea, if we had a New York Times review on Friday, we might have 40 people through the gallery. So showing up for the people who are showing up is key. 

When we were designing this space—I'm visible when my door is open. If I need the privacy for a Zoom call or a staffing meeting, the door closes and we've designed sight lines. John [Kunemund, Partner at Alexander Gray Associates] also is up front with the same sight lines so we can see who is coming in. 

Downtown Dealers: Featuring Alexander Gray, Lauren Wittels, and David Pagliarulo - Features - Independent Art Fair

Photography by Jackie Molloy

Lauren Wittels: I sit at the front desk at least on Saturdays. It's really important to do. The first Saturday of the photo show, I'm standing out there at the front desk handing out checklists. This guy walks in and I say, “Would you like a checklist?” And he says to his two friends, “Wow, Gagosian wouldn't even tell me the prices of anything.” P.S., he's the head of photography at the MFA Houston. He bought three pieces by a young artist who was in the show who has never been collected by a museum before. And when I went to Houston two weeks ago to visit him, he said, “Lauren, you're the one who came out and gave me a checklist.” This stuff matters. That's showing up. 

Elizabeth Dee: Do you do that, David?

David Pagliarulo: Yeah, they get my face the moment they walk in. I want to keep doing it because you get to see, when you're sitting up in the front, everyone that's coming in. And you've got to learn how to recognize people. If you can recognize people, then you can start conversations. People are a lot more engaged than we give them credit for. Sometimes as a gallerist, [you find out] they actually want to talk about this and they have something to point out within the work that I'm not even seeing necessarily. 

Elizabeth Dee: One thing I'd love to see is more talk about the work and less of the sales spiel. I don't know how to reframe that because it's incredibly awkward if you're trying to have an actual art experience. How do we bring some of the things that we value back into the picture?

Alexander Gray: The main thing is being accessible, being funny, being humble, asking questions to start a conversation. This is what I love about maybe the first two days of an art fair, is being on my feet, talking to random strangers, talking to people that I know about the work that we have up and really getting my passion on for the artist.

David Pagliarulo: I think there's something to [having] talking points. It's not necessarily a sales thing, you're just talking about the work, and if you're translating the care you have for the work, then that does the job in some sense.

Lauren Wittels: I don't do this with everyone, but Richard Rezac is an incredibly cerebral artist and a beautiful craftsman. I've been trying to get the language to talk about his work for about six years and I can still lead someone through a show without boring them and giving them my treatise. 

Alexander Gray: I think there are archetypes that we can be aware of as well. I don't want to be too binary about this, but they are collectors who are interested in legacy and where things fall into art history. They are less and less common. And then there are “Fountain of Youth” seekers. This is where speculation comes into the picture and getting there early. The conversations about money are very much tied to the Fountain of Youth archetype. The key thing is activating curiosity. If we're expressing curiosity, then the artist has done their job of putting something in the world that we haven't seen before, that can tell us something about the world that we haven't thought about. 

Elizabeth Dee: Just to play devil's advocate, is that curiosity happening when everyone's getting offered the entire show [online] before they have a chance to come [to the gallery to] see it?

Lauren Wittels: I would say the curiosity is not happening because of the people who come in with their lists of the four artists they're dead set on getting for whatever bizarre reason—because they think it makes them look cool or because it's going to be a good investment or because they want to get one and their friends don't have one. These people have no curiosity. They just are checking off names on their list. But when that artist suddenly isn't in the top five and you go to them and say, “I have this beautiful piece,” these collectors will literally say, “Oh, I've moved on from that artist.” 

Alexander Gray: I think that the attention around emerging artists is a different kind of curiosity than mid-career and late-career.

Downtown Dealers: Featuring Alexander Gray, Lauren Wittels, and David Pagliarulo - Features - Independent Art Fair

David Pagliarulo, photography by Jackie Molloy

David Pagliarulo: It's also a generational difference in collecting. I've been pretty lucky with the people that are supporting the gallery. They’re on the younger side and they're starting to buy art and get involved in it. There's something very important about authenticity in this situation. And that's harking back to an old school style of collecting artists [whose work] feels like it teaches me something about the world that I'm not seeing through other things. And that to me seems to be the way forward, cultivating a younger generation that is looking for something else. Speculation has never been in easy science, but specifically now, there's no way to be speculative anymore.

Lauren Wittels: This is such an important point about new collectors and not necessarily young ones. I've been with Luhring Augustine for 36 years, with a little break in between. The people that we sold to all have kids. And those people from the 90s, most of them have passed on and their kids aren't interested in buying. They're interested in getting rid of the stuff that their parents bought. Donald [Johnson Montenegro], my partner at the gallery, and I have made it a strong point to expand when we get something really desirable. Don't go to the same three people. Let's give some other people a chance. Bring them into the fold. They're not at all young. They just aren't right in front of you.

Alexander Gray: Cultivation is really critical and the access that I have to people is very different from some of my team members. The other side of that is, how to bet on somebody new who's coming in or who we haven't met, especially in the face of the speculation and all the conversations about money, which is another reason we're in this dip right now.

Elizabeth Dee: You think it's been too transactional? 

Alexander Gray: Absolutely, when the first conversation is, “How much does this artist’s work go for at auction?” And when the issue is about what the market is going to be versus what happens in the studio, when there's no correlation whatsoever. We work with artists who don't have studio assistants. We have artists who are known but make 10 or 12 works a year, and they're satisfied with that. It’s getting to know people, where building a relationship leads to a transaction rather than a transaction not leading to a relationship.

Elizabeth Dee: You can make sales on Instagram, but they're one-night-stand sales. You may not see that person ever again.

Lauren Wittels: We don't sell anything on Instagram, but we have made a lot of sales to people at art fairs that we're not able to convert into repeat buyers. And those are good too. They help us cover our costs for the fair and we can go home with fewer holes in our pockets. We're not always able to turn every relationship into an ongoing one. But the people that I've been going to see multiple times a year for years, that works and it does lead to sales. 

Alexander Gray: I lived in San Antonio in the 90s when Artpace was started and a big piece of what we did there was hospitality and inviting people to come and visit San Antonio, being an evangelist for Texas artists. It meant so much to us when somebody from the art world showed up. That red carpet that you're talking about, the lunch with trustees, it makes you want to move out of New York and invite people to come and visit.

Elizabeth Dee: Can’t we invite people and do that here? I feel like we're not doing that because we're in New York and it's the default position.

Lauren Wittels: But when they come here, there's a million people to see and they're here for three days. You're lucky if you get five minutes. But yes, you're right. We had this conversation internally a year ago. Why don't we ever go to see the collections of New York collectors? It is something that we have tried to build, but it's a factor of time. 

Elizabeth Dee: If we curated people's time here the way other people do for us in other cities, I think it'd be transformational. But I also think you're right, the local collectors here, they want to feel needed and share what they've done. It's a huge part of their lives. It shouldn't be that difficult now that half of the collecting population has a home here, but somehow it feels daunting.

Alexander Gray: It would be great if the arc of the pandemic somehow carried over to the grace of hospitality. How many people in this room have been invited to somebody's house for dinner in New York City in the past six months? Silence in the room. One of the challenges is that New Yorkers don't use a dining table. It's crazy, right? There's no room. And thinking back to convening mechanisms, a seating chart is a powerful thing. Organizing a seating chart so that people are not sitting next to the same person that they sit next to every time—I credit Texas for that talent, that skill that I have. We should be looking to Texas for the hospitality tools desperately needed in New York.

Elizabeth Dee: I wanted to have some final closing thoughts about where we can go from here. Things are going to be very different in a year. Are there one or two key things that you feel would be essential for moving this curiosity and patronage forward?

Downtown Dealers: Featuring Alexander Gray, Lauren Wittels, and David Pagliarulo - Features - Independent Art Fair

Alexander Gray, Lauren Wittels, Elizabeth Dee, and David Pagliarulo; photography by Jackie Molloy

David Pagliarulo: For me, it's keeping things artist-centric and letting artists have free rein more or less. I've seen it with friends who are artists. Galleries can sometimes be a limiting space, there's certain structures put in place to change their practices. By letting artists run with it, that creates attention and curiosity, because then they're [leading] the narrative.

Lauren Wittels: I would say much less strategy in building a gallery program. Not making decisions that you think are going to guarantee sales or museum shows for a host of reasons. You have to be more authentic in your choices and not build a gallery program like it's a Lego spaceship. Because I think that's been one of the biggest failures of the last decade.

Alexander Gray: One of the things that is really incumbent on us at this moment—politically, socially—is that we need to describe why artists are the most important members of our society, as avatars of freedom of expression, as people who are dedicated to imagination and who are holding up mirrors and windows for the world to see. That is such a critical thing right now for us to be talking about. 

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Alexander Gray is Owner and Principal of Alexander Gray Associates, a contemporary art gallery in New York City and Germantown, NY, in the Hudson Valley, founded in 2007. Through exhibitions, research, and artist representation, the Gallery spotlights artistic movements and artists active in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Gallery is known for its expertise in and commitment to artists who have been underrepresented in the art market, with a focus on BIPOC and female artists. Gray has provided collection advisory work for private collections, building on his recognized expertise in 20th-century African American art. Prior to establishing the Gallery and its associated consultancy, Alexander Gray held numerous leadership positions in the arts, including Artadia, Artpace San Antonio, Art Matters Foundation, Visual AIDS, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

Lauren Wittels is a Partner at Luhring Augustine, New York. She has held numerous positions in the contemporary art world during her 35+ years of working in the field. Lauren was founder and executive director of Regency Arts Press Ltd., a non-profit publishing organization, through which she published over twenty artist's books with both major and emerging artists. Lauren ran her own contemporary art gallery, Lauren Wittels Gallery, in the mid-1990s. She also served as the Senior Vice President of the Citi Private Bank Art Advisory Service, where she was responsible for buying and selling post-war and contemporary art on behalf of select clients. Lauren holds a BA from Columbia College and an MA in Art History from Columbia University Graduate Schoolof Arts and Sciences with a concentration in Northern Renaissance Painting. 

David Pagliarulo is the founder of David Peter Francis, a contemporary art gallery in Chinatown, New York City. David was born and raised in Tampa, Florida and earned his Master's degree at The American University of Paris in 2018. He previously worked at CHART Gallery as Associate Director and Marinaro as Director.