The Role of Art Dealers: Past, Present, and Future

Stefania Bortolami was born in Italy in 1965. She studied Art History at University of Torino in 1986.  At Sotheby’s Institute in London, she attended a Post-Graduate program in Contemporary Art. Shortly after graduation, she worked in the Sotheby’s London Valuation and Communication Departments while studying to receive her master’s degree in Cultural Studies from Middlesex University. In 1991 she opened a cutting-edge contemporary art gallery in Barcelona, Spain called the Backspace Gallery. In 1995 she was offered a director’s position at Anthony d’Offay’s London gallery, where she stayed until 1999 when Larry Gagosian offered her a position at his flagship gallery on Madison Avenue in New York City.  In 2005, she and another Gagosian director opened a newly renovated ground floor gallery in the Chelsea district of New York City called Bortolami Dayan. Ms. Bortolami took sole ownership of the business in 2007, which has since relocated to the Tribeca neighborhood in New York City.  For 15 years Bortolami has been successfully staging exhibitions, represents 27 internationally renowned artists, and participates in at least 7 International art fairs per year.  

Lynn Gumpert has been Director of the Grey Art Gallery, New York University’s fine-arts museum, since 1997. Among the more than 70 exhibitions she has overseen at the Grey are Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 (2017); Global/Local 1960–2015: Six Artists from Iran (2016); Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera (2015); Toxic Beauty: The Art of Frank Moore (2012);  The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles / Recent Art (2008); The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984 (2006); Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography, A Project by Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari (2005); and Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture (2002). She previously worked as a writer, consultant, and independent curator, organizing shows in New York, Japan, and France. From 1980 to 1988 she was curator and senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. She authored the first major monograph on French artist Christian Boltanski (Flammarion, 1992) and has contributed essays to numerous publications. In June 1999 Ms. Gumpert was honored by the French government with the distinction of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. 

Born in England, Sean Kelly, founder of Sean Kelly Gallery, started his career in the art world as an artist and subsequently as a museum curator, before going on to become the Director of Visual Arts for the Bath International Arts Festival, Bath, England, where he also founded and directed Artsite, a site-specific exhibition program. He subsequently relocated to New York in 1989. In 1991, Sean Kelly established his own gallery representing artists such as Marina Abramović, Antony Gormley, Rebecca Horn, Callum Innes, Joseph Kosuth, Mariko Mori, and Kehinde Wiley amongst others. Kelly quickly developed a reputation for his commitment to artists who present ambitious, challenging, intellectual and unconventional work. His career in New York has spanned over three decades during which time the gallery has become a symbol for high quality, thought-provoking contemporary art, mounting hundreds of solo exhibitions and over thirty group shows that have included the work of well over a hundred artists. The gallery currently represents thirty-six artists, exhibits at the top art fairs around the world and works with major museums worldwide on an ongoing basis.

Lindsay Pollock is the Chief Communication and Content Officer at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Previously she was Editor-in-Chief of Art in America magazine from 2011 to 2017. Pollock wrote on arts and culture for Bloomberg News from 2005 to 2011. She was also a contributor on art related topics to various publications including The Art Newspaper. Her biography of pioneering art dealer Edith Halpert, The Girl with the Gallery, the subject of a recent exhibition at the Jewish Museum, was published in 2006. She has an M.S. in journalism from the Columbia University School of Journalism and a B.A. in Art History and English Literature from Barnard College.