By Andrew Russeth 5/29/12 6:36pm

galleries

6 Photos

Amy Greenspon and Mitchell Algus

Odd Couple: Mitchell Algus and Amy Greenspon Are Showing—and, Yes, Selling—the Unknown, the Emerging, the Dead

Two years ago, Amy Greenspon and Mitchell Algus moved in together. She was a blond, 31-year-old gallery director who looked a little like Alicia Silverstone in Clueless and regularly appeared in the party pages of Vogue and Style.com. He was an avuncular, opinionated 56-year-old science teacher at a public high school in Queens, who was also an art dealer. They were both children of doctors—her father was a wealthy Manhattan psychiatrist and art collector, his an upper-middle-class Long Island dentist.

They had their differences. He was into restoration; she preferred new. She wanted to keep the original façade and floors, he wanted to redo them. He won that battle.

But Ms. Greenspon has won others. The two are business partners, not romantic partners, and Algus Greenspon, their West Village art gallery, has the smooth cement floors he wanted but also shows some of the young artists she prefers.

Even by art world standards, it is a peculiar arrangement. What has made it work? Read More

By Andrew Russeth 2/14/12 6:27pm

Art

Installation view of Danh Vo's "Autoerotic Asphyxiation" exhibition at Artists Space, 2010. (Photo by Daniel Pérez/Artists Space)

No Alternative: Soho Stalwart Artists Space Is Expanding to Tribeca

When Stefan Kalmár arrived at the alternative art space Artists Space in the summer of 2009 to become its executive director, he saw plenty of things that he wanted to change.

“The director’s office was a corner office with a vista,” Mr. Kalmár said earlier this month, with a touch of mockery, “symbolizing a petit-bourgeois notion of an institution. There was a real hierarchy.” The robust 41-year-old was wearing a tight sweater, torn near the elbows, over a collared shirt, and was sitting in Artists Space’s third-floor loft on Greene Street, pointing to where various rooms had been. “Next to me was the assistant to the director’s office, and then there was the development office. Like chicken hatches. In this corner was the boardroom, and here was storage and a facility room, and an archive. Everything that an organization doesn’t—shouldn’t—need.” Read More