Downtown Dealers Podcast Episode 2: Featuring Alan Belcher, Wendy Olsoff, and James Fuentes

Alan Belcher (b. 1957, Canada; lives and works in Toronto) is a Toronto-based self-taught visual artist. Belcher was co-founder and co-director with artist Peter Nagy of Gallery Nature Morte in the East Village between 1982 and 1988. The gallery showcased a post-modern genre of deconstructionist conceptual photography, sculpture, and painting with artists like Vito Acconci, Steven Parrino, Thomas Nozkowski, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Keith Sonnier, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Ross Bleckner, Robert Gober, Julia Wachtel, Richard Pettibone, Allan McCollum, Joel Otterson, Gretchen Bender, and Cady Noland. Belcher has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Le Consortium, Dijon; greengrassi, London; Malborough Contemporary, New York; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; White Columns, New York; Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne; Josh Baer Gallery, New York; Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles; and Cable Gallery, New York, among numerous others. He is represented by Tara Downs, New York; greengassi, London; Eli Kerr, Montréal; and Hunt Gallery, Toronto. Works by Alan Belcher are held in various public collections which include the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Le Consortium in Dijon, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, as well as numerous prominent private collections.

Wendy Olsoff co-founded P·P·O·W with Penny Pilkington in 1983 during the first wave of the East-Village Art scene in New York City. P·P·O·W maintains a diverse roster of national and international artists including the estates of Carolee Schneemann, David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, Hunter Reynolds and Jimmy DeSana as well as representing the work of contemporary artists such as Guadalupe Maravilla, Robin F. Williams, Hew Locke, Carlos Motta and Kyle Dunn to name a few.  An alumna of William Smith College (1978), Olsoff has lectured extensively throughout the United States at universities and museums. In 2012, PPOW was a recipient of the Visual AIDS Vanguard Award for the gallery's dedication and support of artists in the LGBTQ+ community and her ongoing leadership in the fight against censorship. She is a founding Charter member of the Feminist Art Council at the Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum and served on the Board of Directors of the Art Dealers Association of America.  She is currently VP of the Board of Visual AIDS. 

James Fuentes, a born-and-bred New Yorker from the Lower East Side, opened his first gallery on the Lower East Side at age 21. Later Fuentes went on to work for Jeffrey Deitch and Lombard Freid Gallery. In 2007, he reestablished his namesake gallery championing contemporary artists who are atypical from the conventions of their field. The gallery is known for its focus on humanity, history, and society with a non-exclusionary approach exhibiting artists like Alison Knowles, Lizzie Bougatsos, Julieta Aranda, Jane Dickson, Jim Jarmusch, Thorton Dial, Sue Coe, Juanita McNeely, Geoffrey Holder and Oscar Yi Hou. In the spring of 2023, the gallery opened an outpost in the Melrose Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles and in 2024 relocated to a new space in New York in the neighborhood of Tribeca.