Life
On
Display Baang & Burne Gallery Director, Charlie Grosso gives us a bit of insight on what it takes to really put on a show and her most recent exhibition “Boys Don’t Cry”
How did you get to the point of becoming a gallery director? I started out as a commercial photographer. I’ve been a commercial photographer for my entire professional life. 2009 happened, and everybody was kind of hurting for work. It’s funny because you talk to a lot of people now, and everybody kind of points back to 2009 and 2010 as definitely marker years. In 2010, I moved to New York, and another friend of mine who’s also an artist, Keish Bruce, (she’s the co-founder of the gallery with me) she was like “hey let’s start an art gallery.” And it was one of those impulsive things at the time, maybe. The idea sounded right, and we went for it. From concept to launch was 41 days, and we opened the gallery with our very first show. At the time we had 12 artist on our roster, right now we currently have 14. The gallery is now 2 years old and “Boys Don’t Cry” is our 9th show. What do you look forward to as far as going to Art Basel? Is this your first time? This is our first time going to Art basel. Baang and Burne operates on a very different set of conventions than traditional art galleries. We don’t hold a permanent space. We put together a show and get a space for it accordingly. One of the benefits of that is we’re not compelled to put on a show every 4 to 6 weeks, because I want every one of our shows to be top notch. It’s definitely a quality measurement for us. And we also have the liberty of conceptualizing a show and then getting the space accordingly versus being dictated by what our space is.