Feature, also known as Feature Gallery and Feature Inc., opened in Chicago on April 1, 1984, with an exhibition of Richard Prince rephotographs. The gallery then moved to New York in 1988. [1] [2] [3]
Feature officially became Feature Inc. in January 1994. [4]
The gallery always had two or more exhibition spaces, to present multiple exhibitions simultaneously. Hudson (an artist known by his last name only), the director of the gallery, said this was to move "against stardom and a push for pluralism and multiplicity." [5]
The gallery was founded by Hudson, who managed the gallery for almost 30 years. Hudson had graduated with an MFA in painting from the University of Cincinnati in 1977 and also worked as a dancer and performance artist, before becoming an arts organizer. After working for a few years in the non-profit sector, Hudson opened Feature in 1984 to operate with more freedom and autonomy. [4] [6]
In a 2004 interview with artist Dike Blair, Hudson said: "It is the responsibility of the galleries to challenge and broaden the market, not to acquiesce to it." [4] [1]
The gallery closed in February 2014, after Hudson died unexpectedly at the age of 63. In his obituary in the New York Times, writer Roberta Smith called Hudson "One of the most prescient, independent-minded and admired gallerists of his generation." [5]
Hello We Were Talking About Hudson (Soberscove Press 2024), [7] is a collection of 35 interviews with friends, artists, collectors and colleagues edited by Steve Lafreniere.
Although it was an independent commercial gallery, Feature was frequently confused for a non-profit because of its eclectic programming and mix of diverse artists. When asked about this, Hudson once said, "Nearly 10 years of working in the plurality consciousness of artist-run spaces had established my interest in diversity." [8]
Artists who worked regularly with the gallery included B. Wurtz, Kay Rosen, Hirsch Perlman, Kathe Burkhart, Tony Tasset, Jeanne Dunning, Jim Isermann, Nancy Shaver, Lily van der Stokker, David Moreno, Alexander Ross, Judy Linn, David Shaw, Jason Fox, Lisa Beck, Dike Blair, Tom of Finland, and Roy McMakin. [5]
Feature presented many notable artists in New York for the first time, including Charles Ray, Raymond Pettibon, Tom Friedman, Takashi Murakami, and Vincent Fecteau. [5]
In addition to exhibitions, Feature hosted monthly video screenings, readings by authors including Dennis Cooper, Gary Indiana, and David Sedaris, and published an irregular magazine called FARM. [5] [9]
Feature often had poetically titled group shows, including "Godhead", "Sparkalepsy", "Hairy Forearm's Self-Referral", "Running in Flip-Flops", "Mighty Graphitey", and "ITSY BITSY SPIDER". [10]
Dan Flavin was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.
John Rivers Coplans was a British artist, art writer, curator, and museum director. A veteran of World War II and a photographer, he emigrated to the United States in 1960 and had many exhibitions in Europe and North America. He was on the founding editorial staff of Artforum from 1962 to 1971, and was Editor-in-Chief from 1972 to 1977.
Rene Ricard was an American poet, actor, art critic, and painter.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is a multimedia American artist and filmmaker. Her work combines art with social commentary, particularly on the relationship between people and technology. Leeson is a pioneer in new media, and her work with technology and in media-based practices helped legitimize digital art forms. Her interests include feminism, race, surveillance, and artificial intelligence and identity theft through algorithms and data tracking. She has been referred to as a "new media pioneer" for the prescient incorporation of new science and technologies in her work. She is based in San Francisco, California.
Barbara Gladstone is an American art dealer and film producer. She is owner of Gladstone Gallery, a contemporary art gallery with locations in New York and Brussels.
Marcia Tucker was an American art historian, art critic and curator. In 1977 she founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art, a museum dedicated to innovative art and artistic practice in New York City, which she ran as the director until 1999.
Greer Lankton, was an American artist known for creating lifelike sewn dolls that were often modeled on friends or celebrities and posed in elaborate theatrical settings. She was a key figure in the East Village art scene of the 1980s in New York.
Lawrence M. "Larry" Poons is an American abstract painter. Poons was born in Tokyo, Japan, and studied from 1955 to 1957 at the New England Conservatory of Music, with the intent of becoming a professional musician. After seeing Barnett Newman's exhibition at French and Company in 1959, he gave up musical composition and enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He also studied at the Art Students League of New York. Poons taught at The Art Students League from 1966 to 1970 and currently teaches at the League.
Irving Sandler was an American art critic, art historian, and educator. He provided numerous first hand accounts of American art, beginning with abstract expressionism in the 1950s. He also managed the Tanager Gallery downtown and co-ordinated the New York Artists Club of the New York School from 1955 to its demise in 1962 as well as documenting numerous conversations at the Cedar Street Tavern and other art venues. Al Held named him, "Our Boswell of the New York scene," and Frank O'Hara immortalized him as the "balayeur des artistes" because of Sandler's constant presence and habit of taking notes at art world events. Sandler saw himself as an impartial observer of this period, as opposed to polemical advocates such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.
Foxy Production is a New York contemporary art gallery founded by Michael Gillespie and John Thomson.
Jeanne Silverthorne is an American sculptor, known for cast-rubber sculptures and installations that explore the artist's studio as a metaphor for artistic practice, the human body and psyche, and mortality. She gained prominence in New York City in the 1990s, as one of several material-focused sculptors who critiqued the austere, male-dominated Minimalist movement by embracing humble, unorthodox media and hand-made, personal and ephemeral qualities championed by artists such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. She treats the studio as a physical and conceptual site to be excavated, documented and inventoried, examining in the words of Sculpture's Jan Riley "the end of studio arts … and the impossibility of this mode of expression regaining its former creative validity and vitality in today’s world." Art in America critic Raphael Rubinstein wrote that, like the late studio paintings of Philip Guston, Silverthorne examines "deeply melancholic realms, enlivened by the occasional mordant joke, in which lowly objects are relentlessly and lovingly queried for a meaning they never seem quite ready to yield."
Dike Blair is a New York-based artist, writer and teacher. His art consists of two parallel bodies of work: intimate, photorealistic paintings and installation-like sculptures assembled from common objects—often exhibited together—which examine overlooked and unexceptional phenomena of daily existence in both a romantic and ironic manner. Blair emerged out of the late 1970s New York art scene, and his work relates to concurrent movements such as the Pictures Generation, Minimalism and conceptual art, while remaining distinct from and tangential to them. New York Times critic Roberta Smith places his sculpture in a "blurred category" crossing "Carl Andre with ikebana, formalist abstraction with sleek anonymous hotel rooms, talk-show sets with home furnishings showrooms." Cameron Martin writes in Artforum that the paintings are "rendered with a lucidity that extracts something metaphysical from the mundane."
Kevin Larmon is an American artist and was assistant monitor of painting at Syracuse University.
Nancy Shaver is an American visual artist based in Jefferson, New York.
Venus Over Manhattan, known as VENUS, is an art gallery founded in 2012 by Adam Lindemann, with two locations in Manhattan.
The Kasmin Gallery, formerly known as the Paul Kasmin Gallery, is a New York City fine art gallery, founded in SoHo in 1989.
Rosemary Mayer (1943–2014) was an American visual artist who was closely associated with the feminist art movement and the conceptual art movement of the 1970s. She was a founding member of A.I.R. gallery, the first all-female artists cooperative gallery in the United States.
Douglas Melini is a New York City and New Jersey based American painter and a CalArts alumnus.
Adam Lindemann is a New York Based gallerist, art collector and writer who founded Venus Over Manhattan gallery in New York City in 2012. As an art collector and gallerist, Lindemann is known for setting multiple world records both at auction and privately, including career records for Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jean Royère.
Berry Campbell Gallery is an art gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. Its founders and directors are Christine Berry and Martha Campbell. The gallery focuses on historical and contemporary artists associated with American modernism.