The live conversation series, Downtown Dealers, unites New York art dealers across generations to share their approaches and experiences. On September 30th, 2026, Independent founder and creative director Elizabeth Dee sat down with veteran gallerist Rachel Uffner, who reflected on founding her eponymous gallery on the Lower East Side in September 2008 and, over the past 18 years, cementing its legacy as a significant platform for introducing new artistic voices and championing women artists. “We are all frustrated artists that try to do something else,” Uffner wryly observed, who then “want to do something new and expose new artists.” In 2025, Uffner partnered with Lucy Liu, and the gallery’s name changed to Uffner & Liu. Highlights from Uffner and Dee’s discussion, edited for brevity and clarity, are below.
Photo by Jackie Molloy.
Elizabeth Dee: I want to just dive in and ask a little bit about your early history. I know you were at Christie's, which is an interesting trajectory. How did you approach the idea of starting your own space early on? What moved you to make the big jump?
Rachel Uffner: My first job right out of college was at Christie's. It was great and I still know and respect a lot of people from there. But I always knew it was not the right fit because we would sit at a desk and I actually would not see any of the art all day.
Then I worked for some private art dealers that had left Christie's and started their own firm on the Upper East Side. I helped make a private catalogue raisonné for them of Giacometti, just to track where they all were. But I needed a full-time job. So, I started at the front desk of a gallery called D'Amelio Terras in Chelsea on 22nd Street, which was around for 15 years. There, it just gelled.
Growing up in Philadelphia, I was not exposed to galleries at all. So, it was a real eye-opening experience and one that was perfect for me, who liked the structure of the gallery, but loved working with artists as well. I became their first director and started curating shows and working with, at that point, mostly peer artists that had just gotten out of art school. Then I just hit a ceiling, because there were already two partners, and opened my own gallery. When I opened, I started working with the peers of artists that I had already worked with at D'Amelio Terras.
Elizabeth Dee: Tell us about that initial first couple of years. Did you feel that there were a lot of artists that you were excited about and that were available to you to show and to do projects with from the get-go? Did you feel like there was a lot of open territory?
When you started in 2008, we had the [economic] crisis, but that had just followed this incredible rise of emerging art in the marketplace, which was very in-vogue. So, there was probably a lot of interest and heat around emerging artists coming out of art school circa 2008. How did you address that then and how has that evolved for you over the years?
Rachel Uffner: A lot of it is just serendipity. I did not want to open a gallery in Chelsea, because that was where I grew up, that was where mom and dad were. There were only a couple of galleries on Orchard Street, south of here, closer to Canal. There was Miguel Abreu and then a colleague of mine whom I already knew before she opened a gallery, Lisa Cooley. So, it just made sense to move to a different neighborhood and try something separate from Chelsea.
At the time—and this is what happens with the evolution of gallery neighborhoods—everybody that came to see a Lower-East-Side Gallery would come to that stretch of Orchard Street. They started writing articles. There was a big New York Times article a couple of years into when I opened, which I was lucky enough to be included in.
I opened in September 2008, which was super scary and almost like a joke. Lehman Brothers had just gone bankrupt, I think, the day before. I will say, however, that New York and the art market recovered so quickly then, compared to other challenges that we have had since.
That was definitely a challenge. But, because I had the experience of curating shows, I did have good relationships with a number of press people that were and are still very important, such as Andrea Scott from The New Yorker, Roberta Smith from the Times, and Martha Schwendener. They knew what I was into already. Then the artists, too, a lot of them when I first started, were New York-based. Many of them had gone to Columbia and they also brought with them a community.
I will say that I always had a challenge working with certain young white male artists. Especially back then, they had so much more at their disposal. I have always worked mostly with female artists and artists whose practices I can relate to, but there were definitely those cocky young white male artists that were not going to let me work with them.
I had that space on Orchard Street for five years. The last couple of years I was there, people started moving to larger spaces and feeling the pressure of artists not wanting to have a second or third show in their small shoebox spaces. I was in a tenement building, and, on the Lower East Side, there were not big warehouses like there are in Chelsea, so we all spread out.
Photo by Jackie Molloy.
Elizabeth Dee: Living artists, I think, in our collective generations, have seen a level of success in their career that was not even possible for the D'Amelio Terras generation or the Paula Cooper generation that preceded us. The phenomenon of living artists being able to really become art stars and have this profile and demand these prices is a phenomenon of both of our generations. I wonder when you saw a shift in that model changing and how did you adapt to it? You have been so resilient over these 18 years, adjusting to the shifts and changes in the winds, and there have been many. Do you remember a point or a moment when that became more prominent?
Rachel Uffner: When I opened here, which is probably part of the pressure of wanting to have a new space or a larger space, the first artist I showed was one that I had worked with at D'Amelio Terras, Joanne Greenbaum. D'Amelio Terras was not open anymore and I had a big enough space to show her paintings, so, she was my first show in this space. But those first couple years, 2014, ’15, was when I started showing artists that started getting a lot of exposure. I cannot remember when a couple of them went crazy in the secondary market, but it was around that time as well, or a couple years after that. I had not experienced that in my five years at D'Amelio Terras. That did not happen with any of the artists that we worked with there. It adds a lot of pressure.
Elizabeth Dee: Speaking of heroes and artists of the canon, you have done a lot of group shows and kept the program very loose with your upstairs space, not necessarily having such a huge curatorial mandate as in the downstairs space. You have shown a lot of major artists over the 18 years in these group contexts.
Rachel Uffner: Sometimes it was actually a request from the artists who want to contextualize their work. And it is my pleasure to bring in more historic artists and show them with younger artists. For instance, we did a [2014] show with [the dealer] Richard Feigen, showing young artists like Van Hanos and Jamian Juliano-Villani, alongside more historic artists that were in that show, like Joseph Cornell and Balthus and James Rosenquist. It was called The Crystal Palace.
Elizabeth Dee: That speaks a lot to the importance of not only the network that you established, but the collaboration aspect. Working with other dealers in these group-show environments is intricate. You are asking people to give away their inventory, to consign it to the gallery, to show it, to potentially sell it. There is a huge amount of dealer-to-dealer camaraderie that goes along with that, which you have tapped into. But, in terms of sustaining the gallery program over time and how important collaboration is, talk to me a little bit about that element and how that has been beneficial because I think that you are somebody that is embracing new models of running the gallery, new forms of consolidation, partnerships. How do you see it evolving for you?
Rachel Uffner: As soon as I started working at D'Amelio Terras—this is really dorky—I felt like I found my people. I loved my colleagues and we are all frustrated artists that try to do something else, try to present other artists' work, but want to do something new and expose new artists. And, as you can see from what we talked about earlier, everybody came from somewhere. My bosses [at D'Amelio Terras] came from Paula Cooper, and they pass on little nuggets. We all know each other in some ecosystem. So, collegial relationships are really important, and a lot of artists and curators and colleagues have curated shows here, which has been great.
Collaboration has always been important. With Lucy Liu, my new business partner, I just got very lucky. Dealers talk to each other all the time about how do we do this, and can we partner, or just try to figure out solutions all the time—always, unfortunately, having to reinvent the wheel. I was always very hesitant to pair up with somebody that had already had a gallery, because I just felt it would be a little bit redundant and, also, we were already set in our ways. So, when I spoke with [the gallery’s then Director] Lucy, I actually did not know it was going to go in the direction of a partnership. I just knew that I needed something, a little bit of a shift.
I needed a reset and did not know what that was going to be. I remember going to Art Basel Miami two years ago and having the best fair because I did not know what I was going to do next. But I knew it was going to be a shift of some sort.
I got very lucky that I had this wonderfully bright employee that started curating shows at the gallery. I just started talking to her and it organically came about. That has been the shift that I needed to take some weight off my shoulders and also to keep the gallery vital and evolving.
Photo by Jackie Molloy.
Elizabeth Dee: That also breaks the cycle. You and I both come from a mentorship background, where you are mentored by your former employers and then you call on them when you need advice and they are always there for you. Then your employees go off and start their own galleries. So, it is nice that you have been able to say, "No, actually I can provide that opportunity." That might be a model moving forward.
I do think there is more collaboration and more consolidation to come, just given the realities of the costs of running a space like this. I think a lot of women dealers are leading that charge and getting ahead of some of those considerations and saying, "Let's get creative about how we do things."
Rachel Uffner: Rebekah Chozick, who was my director for a long time, actually programmed the upstairs space for three years, just because she wanted a gallery. So, I gave her the space. But now she shares a physical space with two other galleries. That is a really good adaptation. We all have to figure out how to deal with these very real problems, which is that New York City is very expensive.
Elizabeth Dee: What about the new generation of collectors coming in? Who has the potential to become a serious patron and get involved with the museums, as well as collect, rather than just speculate or shop or work with an advisor? I am very focused on who is coming up and who is potentially serious and going to be the next Rubells or the next Eileen and Michael Cohen. How do we cultivate them the way they were cultivated back in the East Village days?
Rachel Uffner: I just had a conversation with a writer, and I kept telling her that I really do believe that collectors are a breed. Wanting to possess beautiful and interesting things is something that is somewhat innate to a lot of people. And this journalist said that she did not buy it, that people really want a return on their investment. We were at a standstill because she really did not believe that collecting was. . . a verb. We actually do meet a lot of young collectors that are very informed, very intelligent, and they need to collect. So, they are always out there and there are always new ones emerging onto the scene. Galleries are, I think, becoming more thoughtful with cultivating those relationships and slowing down and really getting to know these people, whereas it was. . .
Elizabeth Dee: It was a little more transactional during the pandemic.
Rachel Uffner: Exactly. And there was a little bit of alienation of the strong collectors from when I was working at D'Amelio Terras. They did not want to compete in the same ways as these new collectors that were hyper-ly collecting during that time, during the pandemic. We are seeing the more seasoned collectors come back a bit now because they needed a break from us and now they are getting interested again.
Elizabeth Dee: When you and I were preparing for this talk, we discussed keeping the energy going, and sustaining new ideas, and the bucket list of what keeps you motivated with the artists that you have. When I was a gallerist, I needed to get Adrian Piper that MoMA retrospective before I retired. Everybody has personal or professional milestones for their artists. You are now an established gallery and there is a different kind of pressure where you do not want to revisit what you have done in the past. You want to forge forward and keep moving and keep yourself excited, interested. How are you addressing that? What are some of the things that you are looking toward now or that you think about that you had not thought about before?
Photo by Jackie Molloy.
Rachel Uffner: I have felt this very strong desire for a while to get to know the artists of Philadelphia. I was just thinking this morning about how I could show a couple of these artists, because their price point is too low for the art fairs that we do. They really do have their own community and world going on there. For the first time in probably ever, I put art in my car, drove to this new fair in Philadelphia this past spring, and did the whole exhausting thing all by myself—literally driving the art there, installing the work, sitting there the whole time. and taking it all down. I did not want to bring any of my colleagues into it because I knew it was my own kind of passion and itch I had to scratch.
New York is a huge art town, but we are very myopic. Our heroes are all the same and it is so different in every other place. I think just trying to get to know different areas and what makes them tick has been a passion of mine since I have had more time now that I have a partner.
And then, yes, we also have artists that are on the brink of that retrospective, like Sheree Hovsepian who has had work up at MoMA for months now. And, yes, I would like to keep working with her so that she has her really big moment. We have a number of artists that are in that position right now and I get to focus on them a bit more because I am not spread as thin. So, I guess both ends of the spectrum interest me right now.
Elizabeth Dee: We have a last question from the audience, about how, during the pandemic, the transactional nature of sales evolved or changed. How did you see or experience that?
Rachel Uffner: I think that everyone got caught up in a bit of a frenzy. We are all partly responsible, even from the collector side, even collectors that had been collecting for a long time. We got a little bit caught up in some sort of competition and everybody wanted their prize work. Probably, things just were moving too fast. It has been a very good reminder now that the market has gotten a little less frenzied that it is all about relationships and they do take a lot of nurturing. It is great when new people come in. We love that. But for a while there, there were too many new people to keep up with.
Elizabeth Dee: I noticed also that there was a lot of surprise from younger dealers that, during COVID, they actually did not know who their clients were. They had not formed the bonds that you form when you are spending a lot of time with people, cultivating those relationships. Because things during the pandemic were so accessible digitally and virtually, people were doing a lot of buying virtually, but then, when that stopped, it was, like, "Oh, I actually don't really have a true authentic personal relationship with them." And when the market softens, which it had and needed to, in my opinion, because the prices got out of control during COVID, a lot of people felt they had lost a lot of clients. But these clients were not personal relationships that were going to sustain the gallery over time.
I think it was a lesson for a lot of galleries that had only done business in high times, when it was very frothy and there was always somebody willing to buy that painting from you, even if you did not know them very well.
I wanted to ask a follow-up question, which is that a lot of galleries made a really smart shift to also focus on Modern and to focus on estates—maybe galleries that would not have done that initially, because those prices were not as affected by the heat of the COVID market and because there is so much opportunity to do legacy work for artists that have not yet reached their full potential or gotten the exposure that they deserve. I know that, in partnership with September Gallery, you have taken on Reginald Madison and showed his work at Independent 20th Century last week. Do you think there are more opportunities for there to be more of a connection with the program into Modern? And do you see doing more with estates over time?
Rachel Uffner: Estates do take a different sort of brain power. It takes a lot of time. There is a lot of research involved, a lot of people and family involved. A lot of times, you have to track down work that is already out there somewhere.
I think that I would love to [take on other estates], but we would need to make sure that we had the time and resources to do that for more artists because it is very thoughtful work. It is also quite emotional when you start working with an artist and then they are not alive anymore. Reggie just passed away in May. The amount of responsibility that you feel for someone when you are in charge of their legacy, or one of the people in charge of their legacy, is huge.