“The truth is there is a grace to doing this job well. It often involves swallowing your pride and putting the artist's best interest first, always.”

Ryan Massey is the co-director of Massey Klein Gallery, a contemporary art gallery established in 2018 in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Massey completed her BA in Art History from Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA and her MA in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies from Parsons School of Design, in partnership with Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City.

What's the dirty secret no one tells you about running an art gallery?

From the outside, galleries make their work look effortless and glamorous. The truth is there is a grace to doing this job well. It often involves swallowing your pride and putting the artist's best interest first, always.

It is really hard work that can feel thankless. But when it works well and you really connect with your artists, amazing things can happen.

In promo and descriptive copy, how do you use words to capture a business so rooted in visuals?

We try to stay away from subjective words, like "interesting," where the meaning really changes based on who is using the word. We try to focus on factual input. The work is this color, this shape, this process or concept, and the artist intends for it to evoke such and such in the viewer.

We also connect our artists' work to art historical references, which can illuminate the work by showing a kind of roadmap to how it got to this place and contextualize it.

How did you initially think about the gallery's positioning, and how has that evolved?

When we first started we just assumed our artists understood the work we were doing for them, but it turns out not everyone does. We spend a lot of time now making sure the artist understands why we are making the choices we are for them and we have calls often to strategize and help them attain their goals.

We are also participating in art fairs now, we didn't when we first started, and that is helping us broaden our audience and view the gallery through a new lens. Now we are choosing artists who have a very specific understanding of their own practice. Every choice is intentional, whereas when we first started we were trying things out to see what worked and what didn't.

“I'm a minimalist at heart and he is a maximalist.”

What’s one of the biggest clichés you hear about art, artists, museums, or galleries?

One of the biggest cliches about the art world is the amount of writing with so much artspeak in it. It practically says nothing. You know it immediately when each word feels like it's been thesaurized to death and, only the most academic Ph.D. art historian could decipher it.

You founded Massey Klein Gallery with your husband, what's your biggest aesthetic difference at work or home?

At home, my husband is a bit of a hoarder. lol. He loves collecting things, anything really: art, vintage cameras, fossils. And it drives me nuts. I'm a minimalist at heart and he is a maximalist.

Parsons wants you to come back and teach any class of your design, what would it be?

Professional practices for artists. Most schools don't sufficiently prepare artists for their time post-school.

What's the coolest thing to ever happen in the gallery?

My third-grade teacher came by to say hi to me one day. We spent the afternoon catching up and telling stories. It was great to share this space with her.

And Maurizio Cattelan popped in one day, he was sort of poking fun at my husband, who is very tall and he was sitting at a very tiny desk which Maurizio noted looked quite comical. And we joked about trading artwork with him. It was a very surreal moment.

What's your "Spinal Tap" or "Veep" moment, where something ridiculous happened during a show?

Oh gosh, it was pre-covid and this guy used to show up at every opening highly intoxicated and try to have the most awkward conversations with people. Garrett had to politely show him the door, and it was a process just to get him out of the gallery. One time he came back about an hour later and told us we hurt his feelings. No matter what we did we couldn't get him to leave. He just kept popping back up.

Ryan Massey