Downtown Dealers: Featuring Jane Lombard, Lisa Carlson, and Matthew Higgs

Matthew Higgs: I want to start at two somewhat unusual places that I think might be illuminative of some of your history and time in the art world. The first thing that I'd like to talk to you about relates to your identity or image; and the second relates to your philosophy, which I think runs through all of the work you’ve done as both a gallerist and philanthropist. There is a really great anecdote, which is mentioned in the upcoming publication that accompanies this anniversary exhibition 30 x 30, about your hair. The gallery organized the first two New York exhibitions for Mark Bradford. In 2002, at Art Basel Miami, there were shipping containers on the beach as part of the fair and your gallery presented a working facsimile of Mark's mother's hair salon, which was called Foxy Hair. You're very known for your distinctive red streak in your hair—could you say how it came to be?

Jane Lombard: Mark did it. We set up the salon in a shipping container but we had to advertise it, so Mark said he would do my hair as an example. Oh my gosh, he was really good. He put in a red streak and people kept asking what had happened to my hair. And so people began coming in. We had men, women and children—everybody. Mark’s mother and aunt were also there doing hair. They put in either red or blue extensions; even men with very short hair came out with an extension. The only bad thing was that he didn't weave them in, he glued them, so when I got home it took me a long time to get out. But it had been a wonderful experience and I didn't get over it, so I went and did it in real life and I've had it ever since. Lisa occasionally, in the wintertime, says: ‘Take your hat off. Nobody knows who you are!’

Matthew Higgs: The second thing I wanted to talk to you about is the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, which is at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in The New School. I think one thing that's consistent in your history of working with artists is this commitment to art's intersection of social justice and political life, with artists who are engaged with both. Could you describe your relationship with social justice and your support of this prize?

Jane Lombard: I think the prize is extremely important right now. Art says a lot of what we don't say in writing. It hits you over the head sometimes. It's important and it's got to be supported. And the more of it we can get out there right now, the better.

Matthew Higgs: You started to run a gallery in 1995, at around the age of 50. That in itself is pretty unusual. But I’m curious about what your relationship with art was before you opened the gallery. You were friends with the legendary curator Dorothy Miller in the late 1960s, I believe? 

Jane Lombard: I was an art student and it went from there to collecting. I realized I needed a little help so I asked a friend, who was a curator, what I should do. He said he knew somebody who would be really great for me and put me in touch with Dorothy. She was the first professionally trained curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She was great and she knew everybody. She introduced me to people—at one point I ended up out in New Mexico with Georgia O’Keefe. With Dorothy anything was possible and she was a tremendous help. That was a wonderful beginning for me and kept me interested in art. I traveled and I saw a lot of different things and different artists. Some bad artists. But you get a bigger sense of the world when you travel, so I began folding that into the art.

Matthew Higgs: So during that experience of traveling in the late 1980s, as communism was collapsing and the Berlin Wall was coming down, you were encountering post-Soviet communities of artists who were previously largely unknown in the West. Did that plant the seed of the idea of the gallery showing these works in the US?

Jane Lombard: Eventually, yes, it did. Some of those artists needed to be shown. I didn’t necessarily imagine that I'd be running a gallery one day but it was a way to get to do things. I liked it and I still like it now.

Matthew Higgs: In the publication accompanying this show, there's two great introductions. One is by the curator and writer Carin Kuoni and the other one is by the writer and critic Barry Schwabsky. Barry’s is titled “Early Days” and he talks very specifically about his encounter with the gallery’s program in 1995-96. If we look back to that time, there's a seismic moment in New York's gallery landscape with lots of openings: David Zwirner, Gavin Brown, Carol Greene, Friedrich Petzel, your gallery. 

The way that Barry contextualizes that is by saying that globalism had clearly begun in the post-communism world. But he also talks about how he was stuck in New York and wasn't able to travel and he uses this really nice phrase: "these spaces"—meaning galleries like yours—"helped bring the world to me." I thought that was a really interesting idea. He also describes it as a moment when the New York art world starts to become less insular as the wider art world becomes less insular, so we start to see the emergence of independent curators along with visionary or prescient galleries, like yours, who are supporting voices from elsewhere. Did you feel like you were doing something different with your gallery?

Jane Lombard: Yes, that's what we wanted to do. It was the intent to show these artists who lived abroad in places like Poland, Russia and Slovenia and were good. Why shouldn't they be shown here? Nobody knew about them.

Matthew Higgs: The gallery had an almost educational role in the sense that you were having to introduce this work to audiences who were not familiar with them. The goal was to create both an audience and a market for those artists. Did that happen?

Jane Lombard: Not with some of them, but I think with others. Via Lewandowsky, who opened our gallery, was East German and he's still showing and has a market. We did reasonably well with his work. Marjetica Potrč was a hot number at that time. Nobody knew who she was at first. 

Matthew Higgs: I was curious about the economy for your gallery in the mid 1990s. The New York art world was almost reinventing itself after the financial collapse and the emergence of these new galleries in a way drew a line under that period. Did you have a community of collectors who followed the program, supported it, and, in turn, understood it? 

Jane Lombard: It was slow, but it grew and grew. We started in Soho and moved to Chelsea, 26th Street, about five years later and it was wonderful. It was not unusual for people to just walk in and buy things. It was looser and people were buying a lot. That was a good time. I never liked Chelsea, but it was a good place to be.

Matthew Higgs: One of the things that interests me is that your program, even into the Chelsea years, would remain very socially and politically committed. In the current logic of the art market that wouldn’t necessarily sell, but it did at the time.

Jane Lombard: Yes, it did more so. I don't feel it now. I think many people are a little scared to buy that.

Matthew Higgs: I want to bring Lisa in now. You arrived at the gallery in 2011 when the gallery was still in Chelsea on 19th Street. What were you doing before you came to work with Jane? 

Lisa Carlson: I was in London at Gagosian in the early days of opening the gallery there. There were four of us at the time and when I left there were about 45 and two more spaces. I moved back here after a brief stint in Los Angeles during the recession. Then I got an email from Jane’s son, who I worked with at Sotheby’s previously, and he asked if I wanted a job because his mom’s gallery was looking for a director. 

Matthew Higgs: When the gallery reopened in 2015 some of the artists you worked with previously continued with the program and others were new, and the identity of the gallery shifted. How did that dynamic work between you and Jane in terms of shaping the gallery?

Matthew Higgs: The current exhibition, 30 x 30, is 30 artists representing different positions of the gallery over 30 years. The gallery has shown hundreds of artists, so how complicated was it to make an exhibition like this? 

Lisa Carlson: We didn’t do it alone, we have an amazing team. We wanted to make sure that our current roster was fully represented here, which is about 12, and the idea was to do one work by each of those and then add other artists to make it up to 30. The parameter was that the artists we included all had to be working right now and still pursuing an art career. 30 x 30 had a nice symmetry there, but Jane was not always happy when we were doing the edits!

Jane Lombard: There are just so many artists from the past, but you have to balance it. 

Matthew Higgs: What does it mean for a gallery to acknowledge and celebrate a milestone and how does that relate to possible futures?

Jane Lombard: It feels good, it's an honor. We've done this for 30 years and we’ll keep going.

Lisa Carlson: I think you need to adapt as times change. We have a new initiative that's called JLG Projects, which was created as an opportunity to show emerging artists with a small grouping of work or series. It started out in the downstairs gallery and we usually paint the wall to designate the space. The idea was that we could take it on the road, like if we wanted to do an art fair in Europe and didn't get in or something we could do a popup somewhere with JLG Projects. Initially we thought we could do a pop-up at Cork Street in London if we didn't get into Frieze London, but then we did. Maybe we'll do something in Paris one day or even a summer pop-up locally in the Hamptons.

Matthew Higgs: You mentioned Frieze, and I know you’re heading abroad this weekend to participate in Frieze London. One thing that's clearly come to dominate, maybe even disrupt, the art world as we understand it, is the market and its ups and downs. The turbulence in the art market has come into much greater focus, certainly in terms of the way that it has been reported in the last five years to ten years. How does that impact the day-to-day reality of running a gallery and being responsible for artists’ careers, livelihoods, practice, and studios? 

Lisa Carlson: I guess that's one reason we don't take on too many artists. That way we can work with the artists very closely and help nurture their careers and be very strategic in placing work instead of just selling. And again, that's the long game. We discuss very closely opportunities that artists might pursue, like residencies and such, but as the economy changes, we have to adapt to it. 

We still have to do these big fairs because we mostly get a broader audience in a fair than we do in the gallery. Some years ago we started doing Independent and Independent 20th Century and even though it's in New York, it expands our audience immensely. We just have to do that with our artists. And even though it can be difficult—the idea of packing up and going to London during this economy is a little scary—we try to be very strategic. Michael Rakowitz is going to anchor our booth in London and he did the Fourth Plinth in London, had a show at the Whitechapel Gallery, and has multiple shows in Europe right now at the Acropolis Museum in Athens and the Stavanger Art Museum in Norway. So we feel confident that it could be a good move and first step into that market.

Matthew Higgs: And Jane, with your 50 years or more involvement with the art world as a collector and then as a gallerist, you’ve seen the art economy change many times. In Carin’s introduction in this exhibition’s accompanying publication it says: “At this moment, a commercial gallery that is at once joyous and fearless, political and discerning, is also a necessity.” And I think one of the interesting things in that is “commercial gallery.” Do you feel that there is a less receptive environment for some of your ideas now because of the way that politics and the economy changed?

Jane Lombard: People are more careful. But you grow with it. Sometimes you go one way, sometimes you go another.

Matthew Higgs: And do you think you see artists, like those who you have worked with for many years, changing in relation to these things? Or do they just remain fearless?