Day 8
Today I’m not going to Chelsea, or midtown, or uptown, but downtown. All the way to Bowling Green, or more precisely Stone Street – a tiny cobblestoned street lined with houses that feels more like Victorian London than modern-day New York.
I’m here to meet Marla Hamburg Kennedy – a buyer, advisor, collector, consultant, innovator… When I arrive, the atmosphere is serious-minded but relaxed as well. Marla is playing the keyboard, her assistants are at work in the next room, the housekeeper is busy in the bathroom and the two dogs are just waking up. There’s coffee brewing, or maybe I just dreamed that.
Marla invites me to sit down. “Come over here, hon’ ” – what a typically New York treat to be called “hon” or “sweetie” at 9 o’clock in the morning! Then she began telling her story. She knows it by heart by now. She lays out her beliefs and explains her methods, which are a bit different, a bit daring: she chooses not to represent artists, she openly speaks of her choice to speak of art as an investment, and to sell also on the internet. I’m about to ask her the question that’s hovering over all this—how does she define herself exactly—but she beats me to it: “Like a hybrid between an art advisor and an art dealer.”
She points out the Robert Frank hanging some distance away between two open doors—the apartment side of her gallery. She goes and takes it down, and tells me with a smile how, when she was a single mother with little money, she found the print at an auction. It was estimated between 300 and 1200 dollars, she acquired it for 900. She loves it for its faithful representation of gritty New York in the 1950’s.
When the time to take pictures comes, Marla actually enjoys herself – which is a rare pleasure.
Thank you Marla.
From the first encounter with photography to the opening of her own
Marla was always in the art world: first she was an artist, then an art history student at Columbia, then an intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at MoMA, and at the Guggenheim. She then worked at a number of galleries in New York, and in 1989 she moved to Los Angeles. There she met G. Ray Hawkins, one of the only photography dealers on the west coast. He invited her to direct the gallery.
This was her first real contact with the photography market. She liked it and in a few years made a name for herself. She worked with Japanese clients organizing giant thematic exhibitions: Marilyn Monroe, the story of a kiss…
She came back to New York in the mid-90s, when she directed the Howard Greenberg Gallery. Later she began selling art on the internet. But the online market wasn’t mature enough yet, so she opened a gallery with Marianne Boesky in Soho. Together Marla and Marianne created several exhibitions trying to give a context to photography in a burgeoning contemporary art world: the history of German photography in the 20th century, the history of color pictures from the 1970s to today, a Leni Riefenstahl retrospective.
In 2004 she decided to open her own business, which she calls the HK Gallery. She doesn’t represent any artists, but instead, to use her term, “places” art with the right clients. She also co-publishes books, most recently New York, a Photographer’s City featuring pictures of New York since 2011 by several contemporary photographers.
her best memory as an art dealer…
Meeting and becoming friendly with Gordon Parks – a truly extraordinary man, she says.
And advising Harrison Ford on art during the early days in Los Angeles.
Her worst memory as an art dealer…
She laughs when she tells a story about the Kennedy-Boesky opening, everyone confused her with Maria Morris Hambourg, a famous Met curator at the time. It must have been embarrassing for the curator, and maybe a little annoying too she says.
The first photo she bought for herself? Or one that has a special importance in her life…
Reno, NV by Robert Frank (The Americans)
if she was a renowned photographer…
Karsh for the people he photographed.
Arnold Newman for the people he met.
Richard Avedon because he was everything at once: an artist, documentarian and fashion photographer who traveled and published in the world’s greatest magazines.
