440 Gallery: Collective breaks art-making ground in Park Slope
There’s no impresario behind the 440 Gallery (440 Sixth Avenue in Park Slope) the way Alfred Steiglitz was the driving force at “291” (291 Fifth Ave. in Manhattan) in the early 1900s. That’s because a century later, the 440 Gallery is a collective of local artists beginning to reach a wider audience.
Yet, like Steiglitz’s goal of promoting an American and European modernism that had not yet rejected representation, the artists of “440” are as accessible as they are adventurous. Their goals are to sell quality work and encourage a public conversation about art and the imagination.
Founders Nancy Lunsford and Shanee Epstein, plus Vicki Behm, Fred Bendheim, Tom Bovo, Ellen Chuse, Gail Flanery, Jay Friedenberg, Laurie Lee-Georgescu, Karen Gibbons, Susan Greenstein, Katharine C. Hopkins, Amy Williams and Ella Yang achieve these dual objectives mainly through regular rotation (every six weeks) of their work, other cultural events to attract people to the gallery, and, especially, through their Young Artists @440 series. The latter program, run by Vicki Behm, engages children in art-making and appreciation.
They seem to have achieved all this with a strategy that has kept them in business since 2005, relying on income from sales commissions, members’ dues and the entry fees for juried shows. Above all, the multifaceted, volunteer labor of the collective’s members saves 440 Gallery a lot of money, so their income can pay for the normal expenses of running a gallery, such as rent and utilities, equipment, marketing, other professional services and taxes.