NEW YORK—For 23 years the Hackett-Freedman Gallery was a staple of the San Francisco art scene, before it closed last May to operate privately. Tracy Freedman, co-owner and director of the gallery, told ARTnewsletter she is “continuing to advise and assist artists with projects in progress” and “considering new opportunities, both in and out of the art world.”
Hackett-Freedman exhibited the work of a variety of modern and contemporary artists, featuring local San Francisco artists as well as such artists as Milton Avery, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Conrad Marca-Relli, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell and Larry Rivers, who are well represented on the East Coast but less so in California. Early next year, gallery co-owner Michael Hackett and Francis Mill, longtime director of the Hackett-Freedman Gallery, will inaugurate a new space, the Hackett-Mill Gallery, a block away from the old Hackett-Freedman.
“There was no dispute; everything was completely amicable, but I wanted to move in some new directions and I wanted to do so unencumbered,” Hackett told ARTnewsletter.
The new gallery, located at 201 Post Street, will also exhibit the work of contemporary Bay Area artists, particularly Manuel Neri (b. 1930) and Frank Lobdell (b. 1921), but will focus more on artists’ estates (including those of David Park and Emerson Woelffer) and the secondary market. It will specialize in representational and abstract art from the 1950s and ’60s by U.S., Asian and European artists.
Hackett-Mill’s first exhibition, slated to open in February, will feature a selection of these types of works. “We will be introducing some Asian artists who were overlooked at the time but whose work deserves to be shown and seen in the context of the American and European artists who were a major influence on them,” said Mill. —D.G.