COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JACK BARRETT
New York’s 315 Gallery will leave its current digs in Downtown Brooklyn for Manhattan, where it will take up residence at 173 Henry Street on the Lower East Side. When it reopens in January, the four-year-old gallery, which has presented the work of artists like Quay Quinn Wolf, Lucas Blalock, and Amy Brener, will also take the name of its director: Jack Barrett.
“We were kicked out, in the sense that the building we were in was sold,” Barrett told ARTnews. “I received a notification from the landlord that I basically had to vacate.”
The move across the East River came because Brooklyn no longer seemed like a viable option, Barrett said. “I looked around in Brooklyn, but to be honest, I think I just got an incredible deal on the previous space, and nothing was comparable. The area we were in, in Downtown Brooklyn—it doesn’t even look like what it looked like three years ago. There’s been so much development. There’s six high-rises in the area. A mall opened up, an Apple store opened up, a Whole Foods opened up. The landscape’s really different, so I thought that, for the gallery, making a lateral move in Brooklyn wasn’t the next step.”
In its new space, Jack Barrett gallery will be around the corner from Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Sargent’s Daughters. And while many galleries shrink when they move to Manhattan, that will not be the case for Jack Barrett, which has doubled its square footage through the move.
First up at Jack Barrett’s new space is “Place/Image/Object,” a three-person show opening on January 11 that features work by Anna Plesset, Fred Terna, and Daniel Terna. Plesset will supply a film work and a painting installation based on her grandfather’s travels in postwar Europe, while Fred Terna, a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor, will show his ink-on-paper drawings of landscapes he saw in France, the United States, and elsewhere following World War II. His son Daniel, who co-directs 321 Gallery in Brooklyn, will present a work that combines still and moving images focused on Fred’s first wife, Stella.
While acknowledging that many of the gallery’s visitors live in Brooklyn, Barrett said that joining the community on the Lower East Side feels like the right move. “Moving to Manhattan makes our programming and the work we show more accessible to everyone.”