It has been impossible to ignore the headlines about galleries closing in recent months. In a single week in August 2026 alone, two established London galleries announced their closures, citing the changing, and challenging, market landscape. No one doubts that these are nervous times for many commercial galleries – a notoriously challenging sector to navigate.

Yet, staying power appears to be a hallmark of this segment of the trade. Just over half of dealers surveyed for The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026 had been in business for longer than 20 years, significantly longer than average tenures of operation in other industries. In the US, only 26% of all private enterprises operating in 2025 had been in business for 20 years or more; in the UK, it was around 12%. The report concludes that the dealer sector continues ‘to maintain considerable business longevity.’ So, what can galleries do to stay in business longer?

Read up and get passionate

‘Galleries are vocational businesses,’ says Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics and author of the Art Basel and UBS report. ‘There is a tendency to think of them as retailers, but they are better represented as professional services. They are often small businesses run by highly educated and skilled professionals, who are deeply vertically integrated in certain sectors of the market on both the buying and selling sides.’

She adds that galleries are ‘based on strong personal relationships and networks with specialized expertise’ and that, while the market is experiencing a period of ‘adjustment’ with galleries opening, closing, and relocating, ‘the core of the businesses – the professionals that run them – is more constant.’

This is certainly true of Hollybush Gardens, the London gallery founded 21 years ago by Malin Ståhl and Lisa Panting, who are typical of the kind of gallerists who view their work as a passion project as much as a commercial venture. ‘I know that it is a business, but I don’t really think about it as such,’ Ståhl says. ‘I would compare it to being an artist or a doctor – any profession led by a strong interest where you invest time, energy, and passion into doing what you do.’

Become custodians and don’t be afraid of pricing

Of course, a gallery’s first responsibility is to nurture its artists. This is where the passion extends beyond admiration for the work and into a deeper custodianship of the artist’s legacy. ‘We are interested in building careers,’ Ståhl says. ‘And we put a lot of focus into creating new discourse around artists.’ So, the publication Hollybush Issue, described as ‘a contextualizing device that provides information on artists’ practices through essays, conversations, and images,’ is not produced for all the gallery’s shows, but ‘when we feel it’s important to commission new writing because of a new body of work, or the practice has changed direction.’

Creating that intellectual context contributes to the most important of all gallery relationships: those with museums and institutions. Speaking in June on a panel in Art Basel’s flagship talks program, Conversations, about gallery longevity, Karen Jenkins-Johnson of Jenkins Johnson Gallery suggested that artists have to get their work into museums, ‘because institutions show the work – continually, hopefully – over decades.’ This then introduces artists’ work to the public and prompts greater collector interest. Jenkins Johnson Gallery is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

The extent to which galleries fight for their artists – and influence institutions rather than waiting to be summoned – remains somewhat undervalued. It is central to Jenkins-Johnson’s mission. In June, she reflected on working with ‘older artists of the African diaspora’ whose art remained unseen because the artists ‘didn’t look like white males’, and the structure in the art world when she started out ‘was driven by white males and the white world in general’. Her role, she stressed, is to be ‘an advocate.’ Artists she has worked with include Roy DeCarava, Ming Smith, and Mary Lovelace O’Neal, all more widely appreciated and collected since connecting with Jenkins-Johnson.

But advocacy extends beyond recognition. ‘I’m also an advocate for the pricing,’ as Jenkins-Johnson put it. She described setting prices for her artists of color that were equivalent to those of  ‘a white male [whose] work is maybe less than or equal to’ theirs, but who, because of systemic biases, had achieved more exposure. ‘We have to correct that,’ she added.  

Know when to grow

A fundamental consideration for galleries once they achieve success is how to build on it. All of the gallerists on the Basel panel have expanded beyond their initial gallery space: Claes Nordenhake from Malmö to Stockholm, Berlin and Mexico City; Jenkins-Johnson from her origins in San Francisco to New York; and Márcia Fortes of Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel (originally Galeria Fortes Vilaça) from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro.

But we have also seen galleries close because they expanded too fast or too far. ‘Know your size,’ Márcia Fortes emphasized in the Art Basel talk (she has been in business for 25 years). ‘That’s very important to us: knowing that we don’t want to take a step that’s longer than our legs and knowing that our activities have to reflect our beliefs.’ This is also about not being ‘fragmented in our attention’ when it comes to their artists and their identity as a Brazilian gallery.

Ståhl says that expansion is something that she and Panting ‘debate fairly regularly.’ In September they will open a new space in their existing Clerkenwell gallery that was previously used to store art on site. But that is the extent of their physical growth for now. Instead, Ståhl says, ‘We’ve chosen to grow as a team along the way, a decision that goes back to putting the artist first.’ They want to provide a support structure for artists with a growing institutional presence, she explains, adding: ‘We don’t want to stretch ourselves to the point where we have to reevaluate our priorities.’

Jenkins Johnson Gallery began in San Francisco but expanded in 2005 to Chelsea, New York City. This was, in part, because ‘New York is an international platform,’ Jenkins-Johnson says, but also because ‘the financial realm of San Francisco as a whole, as a business area, has declined.’ Despite its liberal reputation, she adds, the ‘peculiar market’ there is ‘very, very conservative.’

Collaborate, don’t be (too) competitive

In New York, after closing its Chelsea space, Jenkins Johnson Gallery opened a project space in Brooklyn in 2017 and, since October 2025, has shown on the third floor of Marian Goodman Gallery’s Broadway building – a flexible arrangement that means if a Marian Goodman artist wishes to use the space, Jenkins-Johnson and her team move out for the period of the show.

The offer for this alliance came after Jenkins-Johnson had initially targeted a smaller Tribeca space. ‘Even though you’re an established business, to stay competitive, every 3 to 5 years, you have to do something different,’ she says. ‘But it is helpful when your colleagues reach out to you and say, let’s collaborate on something.’

In the Art Basel conversation, Fortes stressed her gallery’s principle of viewing other gallerists as ‘colleagues and not as competitors,’ citing collaborations with Max Hetzler and Tanya Bonakdar. One of the reasons for not expanding beyond Brazil (other than an office in Lisbon) was that, as Fortes put it, ‘I don’t want to be competing with, let’s say, the New York galleries. I want them to be my partners.’

Jenkins-Johnson, while describing the more competitive and territorial nature of the US art world, suggests that collaboration is vital to longevity. ‘We need more of that, going out there on that ledge and saying to somebody, “let’s work together.” It might not be for a long period of time, but it might be during that crucial time that it helps both people.’

Be creative, have fun!

Jenkins-Johnson suggests that the key qualities for survival are ‘inner strength, creativity, and being able to be flexible.’ That flexibility, Claes Nordenhake argued at Art Basel, goes beyond business acumen. His gallery celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. During the conversation, he read an amusing but apt list of gallerist duties that ranged from museum security guard via cleaner and carpenter to bookkeeper, cook, actor, lover, marriage counselor, pimp, and psychotherapist.

But a perhaps understated factor in gallerists’ staying power was in his comment, with a wry smile, that ‘still, after 50 years, there are some pleasures in the job.’ As Ståhl says: ‘We have fun at work. That’s really important.’