Gordon Robichaux Proves There’s an Alternative to the Blue-Chip System

Nestled between therapist offices and reiki salons on the ninth floor of a 17-story high rise on the westside of New York’s Union Square, Gordon Robichaux is a gallery for those in-the-know. And in its eight years of existence, it has converted a devoted following, a mix of collectors, curators, and critics, to its closely watched program. Each of its exhibitions elaborately delves into a given artist’s story, paying close attention to their innovative use of materials.

Gordon Robichaux’s spring programming pulls back the curtain on the community of artists it has cultivated over the years. At the gallery, it has just opened two exhibitions, both dedicated to late friend, artist and curator Jenni Crain, while simultaneously dedicating its booth at Frieze New York this week to her as well.

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Crain contributed to the gallery’s first group show, in 2018, a year after its founding, and had mounted a two-person exhibition there the following year. Besides showing with the gallery, the mixed-media sculptor was a critical support as a friend, curator, and a salesperson during their early years.

Her sudden passing in 2021 at age 30 from Covid-19 was an immense shock to the gallery and its community. In 2022, the gallery mounted two exhibitions for Crain: one featuring two works completed just before her death and one for her final curatorial project, “Synonyms for Sorrow.”

A mix of grief and excitement course through the new shows. “Jenni’s work always grappled with memory, and sensory and bodily experiences in relationship to objects, space, textures, and architecture,” gallery cofounder Jacob Robichaux told ARTnews.

The just-opened exhibitions feature an unrealized floor sculpture by Crain, finished by her eponymous foundation in collaboration with two woodworkers she had previously worked with, at its smaller 907 space, while the larger 925 space will host “Untitled Exhibition (for Jenni),”including the works of artists who influenced her, like photographer Tee Corinne, painter March Avery, and furniture designer Kate Millet who was the subject of Crain’s thesis at CCS Bard, or whose lives and practices she touched in one way or another, such as Justin Chance, Talia Chetrit, Nick Fusaro and fellow gallery artist Miles Huston, the other half of her two-person show.

Huston, a frequent collaborator of Crain’s, also stepped in to realize the work at 907, consisting of two large pieces lattice-shaped basswood, which Crain had conceived of for the space just before her passing . Each measuring around 7.75 feet in length, the sculpture’s two elements had to be carried nine flights up by four art handlers. “This is the spiritual dimension of art, that it exists beyond people who make it,” Robichaux said. “One of the central tenets of art making, even though it’s not always conscious, is that there is this object that continues to communicate something in time and space beyond our physical presence.”

Artists Sam Gordon and Jacob Robichaux started their eponymous venture in February 2017 at the 925 space; initially, it was available only for six months. The previous year, Gordon had curated a group show, “Persons of Interest,” for arts nonprofit Visual AIDS at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division in the West Village. The exhibition brought together an intergenerational cohort, all of whom had been HIV/AIDS activists, from deceased artists like Keith Haring, Tseng Kwong Chi, Chloe Dzubilo, Tim Greathouse, Hugh Steers, and Affrekka Jefferson to those who had survived the epidemic like Reverend Joyce McDonald, Luna Luis Ortiz, Raynes Birkbeck, and the late Hunter Reynolds to younger artists carrying on their legacy like Ben Cuevas. That commitment, to shed light onto artists whose livelihood and practices have been overlooked and under-recognized, extends to what unfolds in the gallery’s modest spaces to this day.

As a duo, Gordon and Robichaux organized their first group show together at a law office with artists whom they would soon come to represent, including the iconoclastic East Village painter and performer Tabboo! (born Stephen Tashjian) and the sought-after Brooklyn-based, Ugandan sculptor Leilah Babirye. “We used that first experience as a think tank,” Gordon told ARTnews.

Their inaugural show as the gallery Gordon Robichaux was for mixed-media artist Ken Tisa. Even then, it hinted at the aesthetic and thematic pillars it has become to be known for: sculptural collages assembled from emotionally charged found objects, archival ephemera orchestrated into arresting displays, and paintings with a raw diarist edge. Tisa had been Robichaux’s professor at Parsons School of Design in the late ’90s. When the opportunity to organize an exhibition arose, Robichaux immediately thought of exhibiting a body of work he “only knew through images,” he said, visiting Tisa’s Soho loft with Gordon to see a decades-long collection of ephemera and objects. The last time many of his small-scale paintings about beauty and loss had been exhibited were at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) in the ’80s.

“This apartment was really a backdrop for many performances and ephemeral events that had happened [there] by Ethel Eichelberger and Peter Hujar,” Robichaux said.

The response to Tisa’s quirky but deliberate art quickly established it as a fresh gallery voice worth watching, with glowing reviews from both the New York Times and Artforum. The critical acclaim for the program has only increased in the eight years since. As a commercial enterprise, they have been successful too, participating in important fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach and Independent in New York. But even more importantly, the duo has been successful in getting many of their 24 artists into the permanent collections of top museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna’s MUMOK, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

But the founders are humble about their approach as gallerists. “It boils down to the fact that we are both artists, and we know how to treat other artists,” Gordon explained of their knack of raising the profiles of obscure figures.

Tabboo!—a beloved figure since the ’80s known equally for his drag persona and erratic paintings—is just one case study. He’s had a career resurgence since the gallery’s revelatory solo, “World of Tabboo!,” in 2017. The blend of energetic portraits from East Village’s heydays, including one of Haring, and recent cityscapes paid homage to the city’s glorious past and stark present.

A capsule collection featuring his flamboyant paintings from Supreme followed, as did acquisitions from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (in 2020); the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2021); the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (2022); and the Whitney Museum (2024). Taste-making gallery Karma soon came knocking, sharing representation with the artist since 2021, taking a painting of his to the inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul the following year. Earlier this year, the two galleries mounted a three-venue exhibition for Tabboo!

But the duo said their approach isn’t centered from an academic background but one that puts artists first. “We’re not re-inventing anything but just trying to re-write art history backwards, retroactively with artists who have been kept outside of it,” Gordan said.

Tribeca dealer Ales Ortuzar also took notice of their program. He joined forces with them in late 2020 for an ambitious survey of the mixed-media collagist, poet, and fashion designer Frederick Weston, who had died a few months earlier at 73. By this point, Gordon Robichaux had included his work in their first group show, mounted a solo for him, and helped organize a site-specific installation Weston at the Ace Hotel. The show at Ortuzar’s White Street space featured body maps, prints, drawings, and photo-collages which the artist had created, beginning in 1979 and up until his death.

Partnerships with blue-chip galleries, like Karma and Ortuzar, have been key to how Gordon Robichaux has been able to grow its program not just quickly but successfully. The founders see it as an alternative format at a moment when galleries of their size are struggling during an uncertain market.

“We are growing exponentially, but not in the traditional way,” Gordon said.

Their only physical extension outside of New York has been two quick stints in Los Angeles. In March 2020, they did a gallery swap with LA’s Parker Gallery, and that summer they mounted a group show at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills. Then, in 2022, gallery artist Eve Fowler handed over her studio during her absence to shoot a film. There, they mounted two solo exhibitions one for Leilah Babirye and then one for experimental photographs of artist and Tribeca dealer Kerry Schuss, both of which led to local institutional acquisitions from the Hamm Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, respectively.

In lieu of expanding their physical footprint in New York or elsewhere, the founders instead focus on enhancing their artists’ global visibility. After an artist receives their very first or long-overdue solo at Gordon Robichaux, the critical and commercial buzz in turn lends itself to interest from bigger players, as it has with Tabboo! and Weston. That recipe for success extends across the pond to three London galleries whom they share artist representation: McDonald with Maureen Paley, Siobhan Liddell with Hollybush Gardens, and Sanou Oumar with Herald St. This week, Hollybush Gardens will also open a show for another Gordon Robichaux artist, Rosemary Mayer, featuring the late artist’s mixed-media sculptures and drawings made between 1971 and 1983.

“The art world has flattened,” Gordon said simply.

While Gordon Robichaux may be better known for its focus on artists of an older generation, it has also been helping support the careers of a select few emerging artists, like Babirye, who fled Uganda in 2015 after she was outed. That year, she secured asylum in the US through the Fire Island Artist Residency, where the duo first encountered her work. Her totemic sculptures of a contemporary divinity and womanhood struck them. “As an African lesbian woman, she owns a tradition that Picasso or Braque claimed as theirs,” Gordon said.

But, at that point, Babirye’s future in the US was still in limbo. They provided her with a Brooklyn studio where she carved wooden sculptures out of the debris from nearby bike repair shops that would form the basis of her New York solo debut, in 2018. She arrived to the opening after a delivery shift for Uber Eats. The artist’s second exhibition sold-out early in its month-and-a half-long run. A co-representation deal with London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery followed in 2021. In 2023, she completed a residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield, England, with a solo show there following the next year, when she participated in the Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, “Foreigners Everywhere.” Her first exhibition with Galerie Max Hetzler opened last week as part of Berlin Gallery weekend. And, the ICA Boston has a show of her sculptures scheduled for 2026.

That they have managed to maintain these artists on their rosters is a testament to the care and artist-forward thinking they have imbued into this project. Their secret for mutual loyalty is listening. They want to be “of service to the artists, especially those who haven’t the luck or the push,” according to Gordon.

White Columns director and chief curator Matthew Higgs, who has collaborated with the gallery several times, called Gordon Robichaux “one of the most important programs in the entire art world,” which he attributed to their “integrity, good grace, and humor.”

Part of their success, Higgs said, is that their location in Union Square, instead of Chelsea or Tribeca, makes their gallery a destination where visitors are meant to spend time. “They invite the visitors on an intimate engagement within a small space which allows them to focus on each artist with full support,” he told ARTnews.

But how did two artists learn to sell art to the largest institutions? Gordon answered simply, “It is just enthusiasm, sincerity, and understanding,” before noting that the duo very much had to learn the business on the job. Thinking through the question more deeply, he continued, “There are so many untold histories and we can find connections between these artists, curators, and writers whose paths at some point crossed.” Among them is Agosto Machado, a fixture of the downtown scene who was close friends with Marsha P. Johnson. He had never had a gallery show until his debut at Gordon Robichaux in 2022, from which MoMA acquired Shrine (White). (The work is currently on view in its second-floor collection galleries.)

A loyal collector base, including ARTnews Top 200 Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody, has also helped them stay afloat. “They were smart to see the histories we were exhibiting and where they actually fit in in the larger history,” Gordon said of the gallery’s client base, though he cautioned that “that amazing obsessive collector profile is slowing down.”

But Gordon sees this as an opportunity to “be a part of an experience” for young collectors just starting out. “Our program is our reputation,” he said. “Many people still haven’t heard of us which is exciting because there is more to share.”