When the space is fully renovated I will go back for a New-Kid-on-the-Block post, but in the meantime it is worth stopping by the new Jack Shainman Gallery, which has taken a very raw 20,000 square foot, two-story space in the Clock Tower Building — 108 Leonard — but on the east side, so the address is 46 Lafayette. He purchased it for $18.2 million.

The space is called The Hall, and it has 29-foot ceilings, arched windows, a soaring staircase, massive columns — and I mean massive: your arms go about a quarter of the way around — and vaults left over from when the building was the New York Life Insurance Company a century ago. The building is McKim, Mead & White and was completed around 1898. See more old photos here. 

You enter at grade on Lafayette to a smallish foyer and immediately take an elevator up to The Hall. They are aiming for a September 2024 official opening with a Nick Cave show, but in the meantime, there is a hypnotic and engrossing immersive video installation by Richard Mosse that is really worth a visit. It’s on a 72-minute loop so carve out an hour for it if you can.

The piece, called “Broken Spectre,” captures the destruction and deforestation of the Amazon between 2018 and 2022 through black-and-white stills, amazing drone footage taken from the air using a specially designed multispectral video camera, and a video camera that captures the forest floor using ultraviolet microscopy. The screen is 60-feet long with a multi-channel sound field and the effect is truly immersive.

Shainman — who opened his first gallery in 1984 in Washington, D.C., then relocated first to the East Village then Soho and then, in 1997, to his current location at 513 West 20th Street in Chelsea — will continue to operate his space in Chelsea as well as The School, his gallery in Kinderhook, NY, which was a restoration of a former high school.

Jack Shainman Gallery
46 Lafayette | Leonard & Worth
Tuesday–Saturday 10a to 6p or by appointment

Photo by Dan Bradica

Photo by Dan Bradica