The upcoming schedule at New York’s Mary Boone Gallery includes four solo shows from female artists, thanks to Piper Marshall, who has been tapped to curate six exhibitions for the dealer. Ericka Beckman, Caitlin Keogh, Judith Bernstein, and Angela Bulloch will round out the Marshall-selected program, which has thus far featured Ryan McNamara and John Miller.
The collaboration between the blue chip gallery, founded in 1977, and the young curator, who spent six years with New York’s Swiss Institute, began last year, when Boone got the idea to hire the gallery’s first curator for monographic exhibitions.
“I called half a dozen people I really admired and who I thought understood new art,” Boone told Vogue of the search. “They were Tom Eccles, Ann Philbin, Lisa Phillips, Christian Rattemeyer, Scott Rothkopf, Neville Wakefield, and Knight Landesman—and the funny thing was each person had a short list of three or four people they recommended, but almost every list had Piper on it. Isn’t that funny?”
As an undergrad at Columbia’s women’s college, Barnard, Marshall majored in art history. There, she met Alex Gartenfeld, now deputy director at the ICA Miami (see Suzanne Weaver Will Lead Miami’s New Contemporary Art Museum and ICA Miami a Strong Addition to Thriving Miami Art Scene). It was at their shared apartment that the pair opened a gallery space called Three’s Company. Marshall, then age 23, curated shows with Tobias Kaspar, Asher Penn, Lisa Tan, and Leigh Ledare.
Marshall’s Mary Boone shows, which kicked off this month with Miller and McNamara (“Here in the Real World” and “Gently Used,” respectively, both on view through February 28), will take place over a three-year period. In preparation, she and Boone spent much of last year conducting studio visits—when Marshall wasn’t hard at work on her studies at Columbia University, where she is pursuing a Ph.D in art history. “Mary’s gallery is a place where I can practice curating and the university is a place where I can think through ideas—they feed each other very much so, as the gallery eventually provides a space to give form to the ideas,” Marshall told Vogue.