Three Friends Start a Gallery (With a Little Help)

Most college students looking for a summer job in New York and interested in learning about the art market might try to get an internship at a gallery. But Genevieve Hudson-Price, Sabrina Blaichman, and Caroline Copley had a better idea: Instead of interning at a gallery, they decided to start one.

Their gallery, called 7Eleven Gallery, in reference both to the address (711 Washington St.) and, Ms. Copley said, to "our society's consumerism," opened June 26 and will close in the fall. Their second and current show, titled "Paradise Lost," features six artists, all of them friends of the gallery's founders and none of them older than 28.

Although themselves barely old enough to drink the free wine that's passed out at gallery openings — the youngest of the three, Ms. Copley, turns 21 on Sunday — the women definitely know their way around the downtown art scene.

They all grew up below 23rd Street, and they attended Friends Seminary together. Ms. Hudson-Price's and Ms. Copley's parents are part of the circle of artists who came to New York and settled downtown in the 1970s. Ms. Hudson-Price's mother, Judith Hudson, is a painter who has shown her work at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the New Museum, and the Drawing Center; her father is the writer Richard Price. Ms. Copley's father, Billy Copley, is an abstract artist, and her mother is a former director of the Leo Castelli Gallery. (Her grandfather William N. Copley was an American Surrealist painter, as well as a collector and dealer.)

Many of their friends are also aspiring artists, whose struggle to find places to show their work set the girls thinking about what they might be able to do. Recently, after two of their friends had an exhibit at a clothing store, the three decided they could pull off something at least as professional as that.

"We were walking around Chelsea [talking about it], and we thought, 'We could probably do it for them just as well as Blue & Cream,'" Ms. Blaichman said, referring to the clothing store.

Fortunately, in addition to their family ties to the Village art scene, they also had a helping hand in the less bohemian world of Manhattan real estate. Once they had formulated their gallery plan, they took it to Ms. Blaichman's father, Charles Blaichman, a developer who has been a partner in several major buildings downtown, including the Richard Meier-designed glass towers on Perry Street and 29-35 Ninth Ave., which houses Soho House and the restaurant Spice Market. They asked him if he had any vacant spaces, and he offered them a storefront at 703-711 Washington St., at the corner of Perry Street, in a building that his company, CB Developers, was planning to tear down in September to build a luxury hotel.

"I thought it was a great idea," Mr. Blaichman said in an e-mail message written in all caps. "Instead of working for someone else as summer interns they would get real life experience building, organizing, and running their own gallery."

The space, which has three floors and a mezzanine, was filled with rubble, which the girls cleaned out. They also painted the walls.

Their first show, "Invasions," included work by four artists. Three were friends of theirs, all in their 20s. The fourth was a 52-year-old Romanian "outsider" artist, Ionel Talpazan. Mr. Talpazan, who used to sell his work on Prince Street and whose paintings Ms. Hudson-Price's parents have purchased, believes that he was visited by aliens when he was a child; he paints representations of UFOs and alien life.

"He doesn't have a phone or a computer, so we got his address and just showed up at this door in Harlem," Ms. Copley explained.

The opening attracted "like 700 people," Ms. Hudson-Price said. "It was like Woodstock," she said. "You went outside, and there were groups of people sitting in circles on the street, passing around joints." The crowd was intergenerational, she added. "It was a combination of our parents' mailing list and our mailing list."

When a reporter visited the gallery on a recent afternoon, the atmosphere was low-key and familial. Ms. Hudson-Price and Ms. Copley were wearing outfits more suited to, say, riding bikes down to the beach in Amagansett than manning the front desk at Gagosian. Ms. Hudson-Price was wearing a ripped tie-dyed T-shirt, shorts, and artfully mismatched earrings; Ms. Copley was wearing a strapless sundress. (Ms. Blaichman was home waiting for Time Warner to show up.)

One of the artists in the current show, Sebastian Bear-McClard, dropped in. "Nice tan, Caroline," he said to Ms. Copley.

"Your mom is coming by today, right?" Ms. Hudson-Price said.

Although making money was not their major goal for the summer, the three women said they had sold at least one work by each artist in "Invasions" and had "significant interest" in "Paradise Lost." The gallery takes a 50% commission. Asked if they signed contracts with the artists, the girls said they did not, except with Mr. Talpazan, who they said had had bad experiences with previous dealers.

The most striking piece in "Paradise Lost" is an installation, called "Watercolor," that seems to owe something to environmental artworks by Olafur Eliasson. Three artists — Mr. Bear-McClard, Gordon Stevenson, and Robert S.L. Waltzer — collaborated on the piece, for which they injected three colors of nontoxic dye into a natural waterfall and filmed the colored water as it fell and mixed in the pool at the bottom. The display in the gallery includes a DVD, still photographs, and an installation in which colored water flows through folds of plastic sheeting. Mr. Bear-McClard declined to say where the waterfall is located, because the intervention was "probably illegal," he said.

The building's demolition has been pushed back to November, and the curators plan to mount at least one more exhibition before then. Next Wednesday, there will be an all-day "closing party" for "Paradise Lost" — a chance for buyers and friends in the art world to see the show "in a less chaotic setting than the opening," Ms. Copley said in an e-mail message. A third exhibition will go up in September.

Even after the building comes down, the young women want to continue 7Eleven Gallery, in other ad hoc spaces. Ms. Hudson-Price and Ms. Blaichman both attend New York University, where Ms. Hudson-Price is a drama major and Ms. Blaichman studies art history and photography. Ms. Copley has been studying studio art at the University of Vermont, but she is applying to transfer to schools in New York.

"We're going to try to be a moving gallery," Ms. Copley said. "It's so hard for young artists to show their work. We were really excited about being able to give [some people] their first show."