Hollis Taggart to open gallery on New York’s Lower East Side for emerging artists

The New York dealer Hollis Taggart may be best known for representing post-war American artists, but this month his namesake gallery will open a second location on the Lower East Side dedicated to the gallery’s growing roster of emerging and mid-career contemporary artists in a move to appeal to younger collectors.

Programming at the Hollis Taggart gallery’s current location in Chelsea will focus on artists’ estates and secondary market exhibitions, along with a handful of established contemporary artists the gallery has worked with for years, Taggart tells The Art Newspaper. The purpose of the new Lower East Side outpost, called Hollis Taggart Downtown, will allow the gallery to take on representation of more early- and mid-career artists and help nurture their careers. Working with more contemporary artists will allow the gallery to connect with Millennial and Gen Z collectors who are coming into their own, Taggart says.

“We’ve been around a long time and we can’t just keep doing what we’ve been doing. We need to expand and cater to this new group of emerging collectors,” Taggart says. “That’s one of the purposes of this new gallery, to keep our programme fresh and vibrant and current, because it’s a different operation and a different focus than the main gallery.”

Hollis Taggart Downtown is a partnership between Taggart, Paul Efstathiou and Eleanor Flatow, both longtime gallery employees.

The space’s inaugural exhibition, Boundless, is a group show featuring work by ten artists from the gallery’s contemporary roster, all of whom explore different forms of abstraction, Taggart says. The show will open 17 May, run through 21 June and feature artists including Osamu Kobayashi, Katherine Boxall, Kelly Worman and Joanne Greenbaum.

The gallery will open at 109 Norfolk Street in a space measuring roughly 2,600 sq. ft across two floors. The previous tenant was Thierry Goldberg Gallery, which closed late last year after a dozen artists accused the director of withholding tens of thousands of dollars in earnings, according to Artnet.

Opening another location for emerging artists during a market contraction that has particularly affected contemporary art goes against most art market wisdom, but it is a purposeful strategy, Taggart says. In 2023, he nearly doubled the size of his Chelsea gallery in an ambitious expansion project just at the beginning of what would become a years-long downturn in the art market.

“It’s kind of counterintuitive that we would be expanding at this time, but my approach has always been this way: when things get slow, you have to go the opposite direction, you have to expand,” Taggart says. “I’m buying straw hats in the winter. This will turn around, and I want to be early.”