And now for something different...

“I don’t need a house right now but I do need a gallery”.

November 2006. I was vacationing in Newfoundland, nursing a broken heart. My dear friend urged me to buy a home in Toronto after leaving my longtime residence in Boston. I started researching places on the web, stumbling upon a small commercial space in a Toronto neighbourhood that I loved.

I landed back in Toronto, drove by the space at around midnight, and 24 hours later, plunked down a cheque to buy it.

The 3 years that followed have been nothing short of a wonderful wild rollercoaster ride – thrilling, frightening, intoxicating, fun, fun, fun! Many stories I shared in this blog, and so many more not ready to be told. And then, a funny thing happened along the way.

I discovered that the gallery I fought desperately to survive, was getting in the way of my doing what I loved – seeing art I love, connecting art lovers with artists, bringing art out of cold intimidating environments so more people would experience it. The business of art took me away from the art itself. I looked ahead to 2010, and realized that I needed to spread my wings in ways that I couldn’t if I maintained the gallery as-is.

So as of now, I will be looking for a tenant for the gallery space on 437 Roncesvalles Avenue while I take some time to shift focus over the coming year. I will still be available by appointment to show works that I have in inventory but I will no longer be holding exhibitions at the gallery.

I will sign off by saying, I am incredibly proud of what I have built and incredibly grateful for the community of friends who made this possible. I will never grow old thinking “I wish I had opened a gallery” and though the fantasy didn’t live up to the reality, it turns out that what the gallery represented to me – independence, creativity, fulfillment, adventure – was not in the gallery, but in fact was inside me.

I will still be posting on this blog and sending out emails to gallery subscribers. I have a few new things in the works that I hope to announce in the New Year. Stay tuned for the next chapter…

Image: Do You Wish You Could Stay Here Forever, Geneviève Jodouin at tinku gallery.

Best Art Article of 2009

Continuing my Best of 2009 challenge (led by Gwen Bell), the article that had a huge impact on me and that I sent to my network and friends is one written in the L.A. Times covering a speech Michelle Obama gave on why art matters.

The full speech is here. Enjoy. It gave me goosebumps.

Best Art-Related Restaurant Moment of 2009

So continuing with my Best of 2009 blog post series (as lead by blogger Gwen Bell), today's post is about my best restaurant moment of 2009. This happened not too long ago. Elena Popova, an artist from Newfoundland has an exhibition at tinku gallery in October. She and her husband, sculptor Luben Boykov, flew to Toronto from Newfoundland to attend her opening. The place was packed that night, and as usual, I hadn't eaten most of the day in the rush to get everything ready. By 9:30 I was starving.

I had booked a table at my favourite Toronto restaurant, an Iranian place called Banu. Banu is like a home away from home for me - it is a smallish restaurant run by 3 siblings who emigrated to Canada from Tehran. I've been there so often they all know me and greet me with hugs and kisses, asking how the gallery is doing.

Getting ready for an opening is a big effort emotionally and physically for the artist but also for the gallery owner. As much as I love the energy circulating in a packed room of guests, there is something nice about the hours immediately following, when we can kick off our shoes, and relax.

That night at Banu, we gathered round plates of grilled meats, delicious salads, endless glasses of wine, and raised a toast to the road that brought us all together and the possibilities yet to come.

Best of 2009 - Countdown

Gwen Bell, a woman whose blog I enjoy reading, has posted a Best of 2009 challenge. I thought I would give it a shot and try to relate as much of it to art & travel as possible. So bear with me as I blog a little more than usual...

December 1st - Best Trip

My best trip of 2009 was a weekend I spent in New York City with gallery artists (and friends) Cass Reimer and Nasco Pelev. We arrived to find our accommodation had fallen through, and in an amazing twist of fate, received a call 5 minutes later from gallery artist Mike Piergrossi generously offering us the use of his West Village apartment for the weekend.

My sole purpose in visiting NYC was to see the Yinka Shonibare exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum and it was worth the drive and more. The surprise of the trip was the fantastic Francis Bacon retrospective at The Met. I was not particularly fond of Bacon before this show and I left feeling a great appreciation for his artistry.

Funny enough 2009 saw me traveling to many more far flung places - India, Bali, San Francisco, Zurich, but it was the [relatively] short drive to NYC that was most memorable to me. Good art & good friends. Good life, indeed.

New gallery hours

As of this weekend, the gallery is open by appointment only. I decided to do this for a couple of reasons: 1) to allow myself more time to focus on client sales, which often requires me to be at their home/office versus in the gallery and 2) to give myself some downtime to plan for 2010.

Right now, my planning can be distilled to a choice between two words: Evolution or Revolution?

When something is not working, there are two options available: Evolution and Revolution. Evolution means making changes in small steps, a refining of an existing model. Like my writer friend who is reworking his novel until it is just right.

Revolution on the other hand means a dramatic change - going from A to K in one fell swoop, rather than simply A to B. The company Flickr, now the world's largest online photo sharing site, started off as a gaming company before they reached a point where they were running out of cash and took their existing technology in other direction.

I feel excited to be in this position, and my spirits are good. I have no problem saying that after 18 months of being open to the public, the gallery as it exists today is not sustainable in the long run. And doing more of the same when it isn't working, just prolongs the inevitable. Now, I have an opportunity to take some time off during the holidays to take a closer look at my options, listen to my heart and my head, and start 2010 anew.

Looking forward to sharing more soon. In the meantime if you'd like to visit the gallery, please email me at frontdoorATtinkugalleryDOTcom.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Art People

November has been a beautiful month in Toronto. I don't mind the days getting shorter as I love going out for evening walks, the darkness enveloping me so I am invisible. And then Sunday afternoons on my couch under a warm blanket with a good book to take me away for a few hours. I've been thinking about what to read this winter, and came across a book review from my Twitter friend Rebecca Taylor who works at the Getty Museum and teaches at UCLA.

Rebecca recently reviewed the book The Beat and the Buzz: Inside the LA Art World by Richard Hertz, a collection of 33 interviews with artists, curators and dealers. She calls them "case studies of success in the art world" and distilled the 7 Habits she felt were central to the people profiled.

I don't want to steal her thunder so do read her blog post if you want to find out what those 7 must-have habits are.

I'm curious to know what is on your reading list - whether art related or otherwise. Leave your recommendations in the comments!

The Art of Travel

From left: Mike Piergrossi, Brigid Watson, Amrita Chandra

The Art of Travel opened last week, with a reception attended by many gallery friends, some new faces, and the guests of honour - curator Brigid Watson and artist Mike Piergrossi, both who traveled from their homes in the US to attend the opening.

This was the first show where I turned over the curating reins to someone else, and that alone was an interesting experience.  When I first opened the gallery, and for a long time after, I wanted to keep full control of which artists I worked with and how the shows were hung.  I had some requests from other curators, to work together, but it never felt quite right. Perhaps I was too attached to the gallery? Or perhaps I was just having too much fun doing it myself?

Fast forward to November 2009, and it feels great to have trusted someone to come with the vision and execution for the show.  I literally didn't know what would be on the walls until I saw it installed the night before the opening.  Brigid did a great job, pulling together work from 4 artists that studied together in Venice as part of their M.F.A. program at NYU and describing how the vision was inspired by Alain de Botton's book of the same name.

What was interesting to me was hearing her perspective on the responsibility of organizing an exhibition.  A solo show is a lot of work to put together, let alone a group show where you are dealing with multiple people in multiple locations.  This one was no exception, with one work getting lost, then found, artists in different countries and states of chaos, and a curator who was (understandably) ready to pull her hair out at times.  It made me wonder how I've managed to do this for 18 months while holding down another full time job.  I find myself wondering out loud if it's worth it...

The Art of Travel continues till the end of November at tinku gallery.