Meet the artists-cum-gallerists Emily Sundblad and John Kelsey, AKA Reena Spaulings

Clément Dirié: Was the foundation of the gallery in 2004 your answer to the New York art scene and market of the time?

Emily Sundblad and John Kelsey: When we opened on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, there really were not so many possibilities for exhibiting the artists we cared about the most. The high rents and mega spaces of Chelsea, where 95% of the New York artworld was based at the time, had created a bunker-like, nearly unapproachable reality for many of us, especially after American Fine Arts closed down. At the time, we felt the need to work not only on a smaller scale but also in a less professionalized manner. We were looking for another time zone, so to speak. Our tiny storefront in Grand Street gave us the possibility of experimenting with less market-oriented rhythms as far as exhibition formats and schedules went, and opened up a more livable space to discuss and collaborate in, to rethink and perform the gallery. We were writing a story as much as we were running a business.

The gallery is run by both of you. Could you tell us about your backgrounds and parallel activities?

John came from a film production background before he got derailed into art and writing. When RSFA was founded, he had already been involved with  Bernadette Corporation for four years, working on collectively authored magazines, films, and a novel.

Emily had just finished her undergraduate studies when we opened. Initially, the space was acquired and the idea of the gallery was conceived as a way for her to get a visa to stay in the United States. Alongside the work she does as a gallerist and as a member of Reena Spaulings, Emily is also a singer and a painter.

Your gallery is defined in part by your collective approach. Can you describe the gallery’s identity?

We have always invited the artists to intervene in the way the gallery makes sense of itself. K8 Hardy’s first projects involved the LGBTQ community and were less about exhibiting than gathering, convening, and performing.  Jutta Koether is also a longtime close collaborator who, for her first show, covered the gallery floor to ceiling with small black canvases that became a sort of stage for performances and conversations, and together we launched Reena the artist. Ei Arakawa used the space to elaborate his first choreographic art shows, where art making, research, performance, and viewing were all somehow part of the dance, meanwhile integrating documentation and distribution into the event itself.

With each of these shows, the reality of the gallery shifted a bit in terms of its meaning and content, as more people got involved in the rethinking of what a mid-2000s exhibition could be. Agathe Snow was cooking. Richard Maxwell was organizing country music shows, with Emily singing. John was translating a Michele Bernstein novel. This was how we spent the first two years, because, in any case, we did not know how to run a normal gallery. All the artists were hugely involved. But things became much more defined over time; there was the credit crisis, debt accumulated, and now we do work harder at selling art; the artists want that too.

You are known for having organized the first American shows of such artists as Josephine Pryde, Claire Fontaine, and Matias Faldbakken, and for exhibiting Peter Wächtler, Seth Price, and Josh Smith, among many others. Do you see a common thread to all these artists?

The common thread is maybe: what to do with Reena or what can Reena do? The artists we show tend to have an interest in this question and try to answer it at least provisionally. The answer is never the same. Klara Liden has opened up the gallery to pigeons and installed a forest of recycled Christmas trees.  Merlin Carpenter used RSFA to try out his first The Opening exhibition, and later installed a simulation of the Tate cafe. Juliana Huxtable used images and texts to spin a paranoiac conspiracy narrative about neo-racism and gender piracy. There are perhaps some common threads in terms of an interest in testing feminist and queer identities, specifically in how these might translate into an approach to exhibition space and time, in a place like New York. It is probably no accident that so many of our artists are involved with performance and writing. Choreography, music, and discourse production are common to many of these practices. There has always been a feeling of community informing the programming at RSFA, and other galleries can probably say the same.

Let’s talk about the other Reena Spaulings. This name also refers to a curator and an artist who is represented by other galleries.

That happened after the gallery had already been open for a year when Jutta Koether invited Reena [the artist] to take her place in a group show at PS1. This was our first collective artwork: Immortality. Take It, It’s Yours. It was a very large, black painting on wheels with elements made by  Josh Smith and Kim Gordon. It was a way of rethinking our role as a gallerist, and a means of getting ourselves into new contexts and situations like the museum – a kind of Trojan horse. Since then, we have been able to elaborate artworld relationships that might not have been possible otherwise.

Now we can talk to other gallerists, and to collectors, writers, and curators, as both artists and dealers. We experience things from two or more sides at once. Also, we share other artists with the same galleries that show Reena, so the conversation is somehow informed by these different commonalities and dialogues. It is not that we love multitasking, we just do not want always to be working so hard on the same job, whether as an artist or as a dealer. We have always worked against the purity of defined, authentic roles in the artworld, and to the hierarchies and divisions of labor that come with these. We have found a weird place in the middle and whatever we do somehow comes from there.

Extract from the Art Basel | Year 48 book. For more information, click here.

Learn more about Reena Spaulings Fine Art. 

Learn more about  Reena Spaulings the artist. 

Top image: Reena Spaulings, Later Seascapes 1, 2017. Courtesy Campoli Presti.