Art market watchers with a long memory may recall that it was about a decade ago that Lower Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood started attracting art galleries itching to leave Chelsea’s rising rents and property taxes. Postmasters and Taymour Grahne opened spaces in 2013, followed by Alexander and Bonin in 2016, and on one night in 2019, Canada, James Cohan, Andrew Kreps, and P·P·O·W all opened, cementing the area as the hot gallery hotspot it remains today.
Meet Hal Bromm, who is celebrating 50 years running an art gallery, all of them in the neighborhood that, when he moved there, didn’t even have its name yet, an abbreviation of the “triangle below Canal Street.” Despite his lower profile, Bromm has outlived stalwarts like Metro Pictures (which closed in 2021 after 40 years), Cheim and Read (2023 after 26 years), Betty Cuningham (2024, 20 years), and Blum (earlier Blum and Poe, which announced its closure in July after 31 years)—to name a few of the many New York and Los Angeles galleries to shutter recently amid a challenging market.
To mark the occasion, he will open the show “50: The View from Tribeca” on September 19, continuing a tradition of anniversary shows he has mounted every 10 years. The gallery will also publish a book, New Art, Old Buildings: Stories from Hal Bromm’s Tribeca, bringing together the voices of artists, writers, collectors, and friends. Public programming is to be announced.
Pioneering a No-Man’s-Land
“It was a different world” when he set up shop in Tribeca, Bromm told me on a recent visit to his modest second-floor space in a handsome, slender 1885 limestone-and-brick building at 90 West Broadway. Artists were already hip to the neighborhood’s charms—Nancy Graves, Yoko Ono, Dorothea Rockburne, and Susan Rothenberg lived there—but Bromm described the neighborhood as “basically abandoned.”
Bromm had spent some time working at a design firm in London, where he met filmmaker Derek Jarman and his circle. When he returned to New York in 1974, he mounted a show at his Beach Street loft, titled “New London in New York,” including Jarman and several other artists from the English capital. (It was his second show, technically; he had opened with a by-appointment display of antiques and works of art.) He doesn’t remember if anything sold, but a friend who was in real estate was impressed enough to suggest that he open a proper gallery.
“Paula Cooper said, ‘I hear you want to open a gallery,’ and I said, ‘I’m being talked into it,’” he recalled of the legendary dealer. “She said, ‘Don’t expect to make any money.’” Despite that advice, he briefly occupied a dedicated space on Franklin Street, next door to avant-garde art venue Franklin Furnace, before moving in 1977 to West Broadway, where he has remained ever since.
Bromm can take credit for many times that he was ahead of the curve. Donald Judd was among the first artists to be exhibited at his gallery. In the 1970s, he introduced Italian artists Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz, and Lucio Pozzi to New York audiences. Over the years, he has been early to champion the work of artists like Mike Bidlo, Judy Glantzman, Greer Lankton, Richard Nonas, Rick Prol, Walter Robinson, Kiki Smith, Jeff Wall, David Wojnarowicz, and Martin Wong.
With such a varied list of artists, I asked Bromm if he could identify a unifying thread. “If I see something and like it, and a week or two later I can still visualize it,” he said, “that’s the magic signal that I should look at it again.”
Early Shows of Major Figures
During our visit, Bromm looked back on some exhibition highlights.
For example, a 1979 show of André Cadere, known for toting around painted wooden bars to art events. “A wonderful guy and interesting character,” said Bromm. If he carried his work to an art venue, then it had been on display there, after a fashion. (Novelist Rachel Kushner mentions an artist who is obviously based on him in her acclaimed 2013 novel The Flamethrowers.)
At a dinner party in the early ‘80s, people were asking who was making those delightful chalk drawings in the subway, Bromm recalled. That’s Keith Haring, and he’s my student, said Jeanne Siegel of the School of Visual Arts. The result was Haring’s first gallery outing, a two-person show with Frank Young. (Bromm recalled a preparatory, early morning studio visit during which a young artist named Jean-Michel Basquiat came by for a visit, eventually offering a massive joint. “It was a little too early for me,” said Bromm.)
The dealer recalled that Haring showed painting on paper, sometimes in bright colors on Kraft paper. “The synergy between the brown paper and the Day-Glo paint really grabbed you,” he said. He was recently able to re-acquire a found and painted-on crib from that show, soon to appear in a Haring exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Wojnarowicz had only been showing for a year when he had a 1983 Bromm solo featuring paintings along with totem-style sculptures made from large pieces of driftwood painted and propped on end on a sand-covered floor; he was too broke to afford traditional art materials, and other works were created on found maps. Bromm lent the important 1982 work Untitled (Green Head) to the acclaimed 2018 retrospective, “David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night,” at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
Partly through Wojnarowicz, Bromm met other East Village artists, like Bidlo, Mark Kostabi, Lankton, Robinson, and Kiki Smith, all of whom he grouped together in a big 1984 show, later opening a temporary outpost in the Village, alongside galleries like Gracie Mansion and P·P·O·W.
Bromm had a harrowing experience on September 11, 2001, being just six blocks north of the World Trade Center. He looked back to a show of Renate Aller photographs of the faces of her neighbors, navigating a changed city, that he mounted one year later.
In 2005, the year of the gallery’s 30th anniversary, an exhibition honored four artists whose lives were cut short by AIDS: Carlos Alfonzo along with Frangella, Haring, and Wojnarowicz. Queerness has become enough of a throughline in the gallery’s programming that he has recently mounted a two-part exhibition, “The Queer Show,” featuring artists like John Ashbery, Jess Collins, and Roni Horn.
The Avant-Gardist Who’s Also a Preservationist
On top of showing so much cutting-edge art, Bromm also has a preservationist streak. When he saw many old Tribeca buildings renovated and stripped of their historic character, he recruited his neighbors to lobby the Landmarks Preservation Commission to evaluate the neighborhood as a historic district; in the early ’90s, four such neighborhoods were so designated. “Hal is a hero,” Lynn Ellsworth, chairperson of the Tribeca Trust, told AM New York.
His preservationist efforts also extend across the Hudson River. In 1990, seeking a country home, Bromm and his longtime partner, bereavement therapist Doneley Meris, bought the tumbledown Delawanna Hotel in Delaware, New Jersey (Bromm’s native state), 80 miles from New York, and started restoring it. It was a Civil War-era house that had been expanded at the turn of the century into a 23-room working-class hotel. It is chockablock with works by artists like Frangella, Haring, Deb Kass, Allan McCollum, Pozzi, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Wojnarowicz, and Wong, alongside an enviable array of collectibles and bric-a-brac. Bromm is also involved in restoring a ca. 1795 farmstead nearby.
After so many years in the art business, Bromm can’t help but be saddened at the way some things have changed.
“What I regret is how art has become so commodified,” he said. “In the early years, so many of the collectors were just wonderful people who bought work because they loved it and didn’t want to live without it. It wasn’t calculated. ‘Are they on the way up or down? Is it a good investment?’ That wasn’t part of the deal.”
Art fairs dominate many galleries’ schedules these days, possibly sucking up tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes for slim returns. Not Bromm.
“We used to go to fairs,” he said, thinking back to Arte Fiera in Bologna, the first he remembers showing at. He’s shown at Art Basel. He recalls joking with other dealers at Art Chicago (now Expo Chicago) about having to cover your art up with a tarp if it rained because the roof leaked.
“But at a certain point,” he said, “I thought, ‘We don’t need to do this anymore.’ I have colleagues who, all they do is go to fairs. To me, it sounds dreadful, just thinking about logistics, the planning, the expense, and hoping you’re going to sell enough to cover your ass. For younger dealers it’s important.”
He acknowledges that there may be a downside to his blissful absence from the circuit, admitting, “There are probably a lot of younger collectors who don’t know we exist.” I asked what was the last art fair he showed at. “I have no idea,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
The Rave Reviews
You don’t survive 50 years without the respect of your peers and the artists you show.
“Hal was already an established gallery at the point where we popped up, opening spaces in the East Village,” dealer Gracie Mansion told me in a phone conversation, recalling Bromm’s temporary Avenue A outpost, adding that, by contrast, “We were artists pretending to be galleries!”
“As a dealer, he’s so trustworthy,” Mansion said. “He’s the type of person you work together with to get things accomplished.”
Many in the art world have touted their efforts to rectify historical imbalances by showing women artists, but Mansion pointed out that Bromm got there before it was a thing. “He showed a lot of women artists from the very beginning,” she said, noting as an example his “ardent” support of Rosemarie Castoro. (Also on the roster: Alice Adams, Jean Foos, Linda Francis, Glantzman, Natalya Nesterova, Jody Pinto, and Susana Tanger.)
On a personal note, Mansion recalled oohing and aahing as Bromm showed her around his elegant apartment; at one point he opened a drawer in the kitchen to point out “the one thing you cannot live without” when entertaining, which turned out to be a plate warmer. “I have yet to get one,” she said.
Lucio Pozzi, principally known as a painter, has shown with Bromm since 1976. “He pays very discreet attention,” he said in a phone conversation. “He’s very attentive, very focused. His approach is defined not by calculation, but by thought. Hal stands out as the epitome of a dealer who follows instinct and intuition and does not follow pre-established rules and canons.”
Norman Kleeblatt, formerly chief curator at New York’s Jewish Museum, admitted that he hadn’t bought anything from the gallery, but was quick to point out that his “transactions” with Bromm have been “intellectual and aesthetic and human.” Bromm, he said, has always operated what seemed to be something of a gallery/salon hybrid, where “Hal was sharing his admiration and his discoveries—and it didn’t always have a price tag on it.”