I was walking up West Broadway the other day, when I spotted this figure on the exterior of 383 West Broadway, current home of “Free People,” a women’s clothing store. But this figure comes from the past, back a few decades, when SoHo was the center of the art world in New York City. This building was home to Ivan Karp’s gallery O.K. Harris, which was one of the first art galleries in the neighborhood when it opened in 1969. The gallery existed for 45 years, and there’s a nice archive of it here.
Back in my younger days when there were still a lot of galleries in SoHo, I certainly stopped in O.K. Harris a number of times. I’m trying to find who the artist is that made this exterior sculpture, and have not had any luck so far … if anyone knows more info on this, please share the info in the comments section below.
On a side note, when I was in college, I participated in a special program that Drew University offered called “The New York Art Semester,” where our class met in New York City twice a week, visiting art galleries, artists in their studios, with collectors at their homes, and with musuem curators. The program has the goal of giving one a behind-the-scenes view of the art world, and some understanding of the business side of the arts. It was a fantastic experience, and one of the main draws that brought me to Drew University in the first place.
Believe it or not, I still have my class journals from my participation in the Drew University Art Semester, and remembered that we visited with Ivan Karp at O.K. Harris in February of 1989. Here’s a few items of interest from my journal entry that day:
“He describes the 57th Street and the Madison Avenue galleries as being the original ‘Golden Belt’ for the New York art world; people thought that galleries should only be in a prosperous area. Ivan believes that if you have good art to show, that people will go anywhere to see it (this is his rationalization for opening his gallery downtown). Another advantage of moving downtown at that time (late 60’s, early 70’s) was that the rents were extremely cheap; the old warehouses were empty and the landlords would let people move in cheaply so that they would take care of their buildings.”
“He talks about the art world of the 50’s: ‘You had to be alienated. You had to hide in the corners and mumble at the gallery openings.’ While the Abstract Expressionists were concentrating on their inner selves, Pop art was outside of the self – optimistic – and it changed the atmosphere of the art world. ‘It was a spirited time,’ he said.”
“All of the galleries back in the 60’s were about 600 to 700 square feet. When he moved downtown, he was able to get 7000 square feet – he claims he had the world’s largest gallery at that time. He was the first to see the slides of Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Roy Lichtenstein (when he worked for Leo Castelli Gallery). About his own gallery he says, ‘We consistently show the nost professional work.’ He comments on the fact that SoHo has over 165 galleries; he also tosses out a figure of 650 galleries (for what geographic region, it’s not clear) and wonders how they all make a living. ‘It’s very hard,’ he says.”
And then there’s this quote, that I wrote down in my journal, with Ivan Karp’s opinion of Andy Warhol when he first appeared in the New York art world: “He was a strange man with strange pictures. No one liked this man.” Yet at the same time, he got his friends to buy Warhol’s flower paintings when they first came out in 1964 for $350, and mentions that (at the time of this class visit to his gallery, in 1989), they have been sold at auction for as much as $140,000. Well, I can add now – if any of those original buyers still had their $350 investment, the record price for a Warhol Flower painting happened at Christie’s auction house in NYC in 2024 for $35.48 million!