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Kerry Nolan: This is All of It. I'm Kerry Nolan, in for Alison Stewart. There are only a handful of Black female art gallery owners in New York City right now and only one currently operating in Chelsea, Nicola Vassell. Vassell opened her gallery in 2021 on 10th Avenue and 18th Street. Before, after coming to New York from her home country of Jamaica, she spent her career working with major galleries and art collectors, including a relationship with the artist Kehinde Wiley before she decided to go out on her own. Nicola joined us at the end of Black History Month, and Alison started by asking her what her earliest impression of art was.

Nicola Vassell: I grew up in Jamaica, the Island of Jamaica, and looking back at my early childhood, I remember that art was inherent. It was everywhere, of course, music being the mainstay of the larger cultural expression, but Jamaicans want to be incredibly expressive, visual resonance is very important, creative expression is very important, so arts, in general, felt very natural to me, and something that was a big thing.

Alison Stewart: When did you realize you wanted to head to New York City?

Nicola Vassell: Oh, I actually understood that from early in my teens. I was described as a quite willful child, and something about the normative structure of life at home didn't really appeal to me, so I understood that I would have to venture outwards. At a certain point, New York just seemed like the most exciting place to do that, and I pursued that idea quite vigorously to my poor mother's chagrin.

Alison Stewart: I was going to say now that you're an adult, what does willful child mean to you? What did they really mean?

Nicola Vassell: Yes. Willful children have to be understood and appreciated for an actual sense of self-determination. I think that that's the translation as an adult. Perhaps at a young age, it's not in a form that can be easily understood, but I do think that, often, we're granted by the gods or by the universal wisdom with certain traits and characteristics. I think willfulness, when properly shaped, really is the bedrock of self-determination.

Alison Stewart: Yes, I know. I've talked to other parents about that, and they've said you don't want to break a kid's will, you want to support it and enhance it but also channel it the right way.

Nicola Vassell: Exactly, exactly. Some parents can misunderstand that and try to impose their will, and I think it's a fine balance.

Alison Stewart: The New York Times did a profile of you, and they described your first major relationship with an artist was with Kehinde Wiley.

Nicola Vassell: That's right.

Alison Stewart: He did President Obama's portrait and has an amazing piece in the Brooklyn Museum. How did you meet? What did you see?

Nicola Vassell: We met in his studio. It was right when I just started working with Jeffrey and he had landed on the cover of Art in America. It was a wonderful profile written by the incredibly brilliant Professor Sara Luis. It felt like the beginnings of a very strong community. I remember so vividly that night in his studio in Chelsea on 23rd Street.

It became very clear to me shortly after meeting him that there was not a force in the world that would stop Kehinde because he was a force himself, and that he had absolutely ambitions to speak to the world in his own voice and to really present the ideas that are the foundation of his practice into the world, which at the time, it's more commonplace now, a lot of the things that Kehinde aimed for, but at the time, it was fairly novel in the context of that period, but there was nothing that was going to stop him. He too is willful and, without question, a force of nature.

Alison Stewart: During the course of your career, you were a director at one of the blue-chip galleries, Pace. You had your own consultancy, and you worked with the Dean Collection, which is this amazing family art collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. In your work with them, you did something called The No Commission Project, and I thought this was really interesting. Could you explain this project and the origin of the initiative?

Nicola Vassell: Oh, absolutely. When No Commission launched, I was a couple of years into my consultancy, and I was really looking for unusual projects. Having spent my time in the gallery, white cube setting, I really wanted to go out into the world and have some conversations. Kasseem, Alicia, they are incredibly generous and they love connecting with community and spreading messages. At the time, he really felt strongly about the artists' position in the economic framework of the art ecosystem.

It was a marriage of a number of aims namely No Commission was a music festival and art fair married together. How we presented it was an invitational, so it was like a curated project. We invited artists to participate. It would have the fair and festival for about three to four days, and we would sell works, and the artist would keep 100% of the earnings, hence the title, No Commission.

A number of things were achieved. Obviously, Kasseem and Alicia being music people, they were really able to tap into their frameworks and bring incredible talent to this for. Then, of course, we really had an opportunity to invite artists to do something they hadn't done, and there was a huge economic benefit on the back end. I think we ticked a couple of very interesting boxes,and we took it all around the world over a number of years. We did it, of course here, nationally in New York. We did it in the Bronx, which is Kasseem's home part of the city. We did it in Miami. We also took it to London. We went as far as Shanghai. We were in Berlin. It was fabulous.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Nicola Vassell, and that's the name of her gallery as well. Nicola, when did you know you were going to open your own gallery? What void did you know you wanted to fill?

Nicola Vassell: I'm so glad you asked that question on the heels of No Commission because by the time we closed out that project, I was pretty exhausted and I felt I'd hit a ceiling, my curiosity ceiling in terms of running around trying to have these conversations. At a certain point, I had a yearning for the early days, going back to a very much a traditional way of operating in the art world, while understanding that the world had really changed since then. That occurred to me to be a very interesting prospect.

At the same time, I realized that there would be an efficiency to consolidating all those efforts into one place. I'm a Virgo, so I love efficiencies. It was my logical mind initially veering towards the notion of efficiency, and at a certain point, I realized that myself and my amazing team, we could really use this as a quietly revolutionary platform.

Alison Stewart: Your very first show was with someone who's actually a recent guest on this show, Ming Smith. Why did you want Ming's show to be your first? Her photography is spectacular, but there must have been something about her and your relationship with her, that this would be your first show in your gallery.

Nicola Vassell: Yes, amazing. Ming and I have a very interesting story, and our beginnings are really unlike any other beginning I had with an artist. Ming and I danced together for many years. We were doing Afro-Cuban together at Aly Extension and sometimes Geneva. I knew her in the context of dance, and I hadn't made the connection at that point that she was the Ming Smith that I went on to know.

Now, at a certain point, actually, at one of our earliest No Commissions, a mutual friend of ours, Sherry Bronfman, connected us. When I understood what this was, I said, "Oh my goodness, this is a brilliant diamond hidden away." Ming and I just spent time forging over a number of years prior to opening the gallery, a very wonderful relationship and sisterhood. We would dance, we would go eat, we lived in Harlem together, we went to the park. It was very much like a sisterhood, and she was integral to the fortitude that was required to open this gallery. She was very much a support system.

At a certain point, as she began to peel back the layers of her archive, I was just astonished even further that-- Ming is really a once-in-a-generation kind of artist. You have different kinds of artists, and she is of the slant that is really gifted by the gods, somehow. She's having a conversation in some other paradigm that allows her to see how she sees and creeded how she creeds given the minuscule opportunity that any actual image affords you when you're taking that photograph. I understood that she was channeling something and that she needed to be heard simply because of that power.

In a sense, Ming really represented her five decades of adventure, fearlessness, curiosity as a woman, as a woman of color in the world, traveling, capturing, and then alchemically shifting what photography even looks like and feels like. I understood that she was the underlying. She was the embodiment of what we hope to achieve with the gallery. There was no question in my mind, she was going to be our inaugural show for that reason.

Kerry Nolan: That was Allison's conversation with Nicola Vassell, owner of a gallery bearing her name and the only Black female-owned art gallery currently operating in Chelsea. That's All Of It for today's Women's History Month Show.

All of It is produced by Andrea Duncan-Mao, Kate Hinds, Jordan Lauf, Simon Close, Zach Gottehrer-Cohen, L. Malik Anderson, and Luke Green. Megan Ryan is the Head of Live Radio. Our engineers are Juliana Fonda, Jason Isaac, and our intern is Kat St. Martin. Luscious Jackson does our music. If you missed any segments this week, you can catch up by listening to our podcast available on your podcast platform of choice, and if you like what you hear, please leave us a great rating. I'm Kerry Nolan. Thanks so much. Alison's back on Monday.

 

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