The following profile was published in DREW Magazine, Volume 25, No. 1, Winter 1998.
It may be a world’s first – a he said/she said story in which the he, Mark McKinney C’90, and the she, Anne Yearsley C’90, steadfastly agree. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the two are in harmony about so much. For the better part of the past decade, the lives of these former classmates, lived apart, have been in eerie sync. Just ask them.
Both came to Drew with an interest in art, but the general idea that it would be hard, if not impossible, to fashion a career in the field. “I thought that with an art degree you could either teach or work in a museum; that’s about it,” Yearsley says. “I never thought it was a realistic way to make a living,” McKinney adds.
But then came The New York Semester on Contemporary Art, which exposed both to the idea that perhaps the art world was not only a viable place to earn a living, but also one brimming with options. “Art Semester gave me the opportunity to see and meet curators, gallery owners, and artists. It really cemented in my mind what I wanted to do and that it was possible to do it,” Yearsley says, echoing, again, the sentiments of her classmate.
In 1989, when the art department honored Yearsley and McKinney by picking them to run the Korn Gallery on campus, it was a foreshadowing of things to come and another example of how their lives kept falling back into lockstep.
After graduation, Yearsley earned a master’s in art history at Montclair State while curating the Montclair State gallery, which was slightly bigger than Korn and included a sculpture garden. She then landed a plum job as director of the Amos Eno Gallery, one of the oldest and most established nonprofit spaces in SoHo. What’s more, an artist with the gallery offered to let Yearsley and her husband, Anthony Crisafulli, sublease a SoHo loft designated as an artist-in-residence dwelling. In layman’s terms that means a lot of space for a little money – a New York City rarity.
McKinney went right to work for Pace/MacGill Gallery, a renowned photography gallery in New York where he had interned during his senior year at Drew. For him, the initial months at Pace/MacGill were a heady time. “I was going to William Wegman’s studio, Robert Frank’s studio, Robert Rauchenberg’s studio, and meeting all these important figures that I had read about in my art history classes.”
He also admired Peter MacGill, the founder of the gallery. “When I started there, Peter was only 35 and had already achieved tremendous success. He was someone who had a plan, worked at it, moved up, and succeeded.” Thinking about what MacGill had done, and seeing how he handled it on a day-to-day basis, inspired McKinney to strike out on his own. Unlike so many who have a dream, McKinney got right to work chasing it.
Previously, he would spend the bulk of his free time playing pick-up basketball, but now he went cold turkey, spending every spare moment zig-zagging across the city in an unceasing search for up-and-coming artists (among them fellow members of the Class of 1990 Jay Golub and Meredith Snow). He repainted his apartment and stuffed most of his worldly belongings into a tiny closet, trying to convert his modest, Lower East Side one-bedroom apartment into something that could adequately pass for an art gallery.
Yearsley and her husband Anthony Crisafulli were in their SoHo space, trying to figure out how they could use it to show artwork, when they received an invitation to the first reception for McKinney Arts.
“We were thinking about doing the same thing,” Yearsley says, “and we went to Mark’s reception. To see what he did in a much smaller space than I had really inspired me.”
So Yearsley and Crisafulli went to work. “We put up walls, bought lights, got together a group of artists, sent out announcements, and, on the first night, had a line to get in.”
They called it Spring – “It started in the spring, we were on Spring Street, and we thought of ourselves as a springboard for artists.” But, just like McKinney Arts, getting it started wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounds; it took a healthy dose of spunk and spit.
“Mark and I scratched our way up, inch by inch,” Yearsley says. “The only reason that we did so well so fast was that we were scratching 25 hours a day, seven days a week. Opportunity seems to find people with this sort of dedication rather than the other way around.”
But when the city cracked down on the artist-in-residence designations and the couple’s rent skyrocketed to $4,000 a month, the two beelined to Philadelphia and a brownstone on Pine Street.
Starting again from scratch, Yearsley says, “We worked two jobs each and did all the construction ourselves. We budgeted only $20 a week for food and were thankful for the opportunity to do so.”
The Yearsley Spring Gallery in Philadelphia made quite a splash, with extensive reviews in the Philadelphia Inquirer and a lengthy feature in Philadelphia Weekly. This fall Yearsley Spring featured the work of Craig Matthews (C’91) in a show titled Flesh Island, which revolves around the intrigue of a comic book narrative.
Yearsley’s biggest headache at this point? “Artists not being as prepared as they say they’ll be. This means that I have to stay up until 5 in the morning and perform last minute triage on the exhibition; then I have to be bright and cheerful at the reception the next day.”
McKinney’s main frustration is more basic: The stomach-churning catch-22 of needing a good location to get the foot traffic that any sort of storefront business needs, yet not being able to afford a good location without significant sales in the first place.
After closing the $tanton Street apartment/gallery, McKinney moved to a storefront in the East Village, not exactly a hotbed of art world activity. He lived in the storefront, closing the front gate every night and leaving himself without a teaspoon of light or fresh air. It was akin to living in a coffin – a coffin with street noise. When he got engaged to a former Pace/MacGill colleague, McKinney decided he’d had enough of the dungeon digs. He wanted something slightly better – “Like a regular apartment,” he says sighing.
He moved to a refurbished building on Wall Street, where conference rooms can be reserved by residents and he can show his artists’ work to private clients. Ultimately, he hopes to showcase his artists in an area more accessible to art collectors.
“I need to be able to do it in a good location, with consistent hours,” McKinney says. “I need to bide my time and find the right financial backing so I can give it a full go. In the meantime, I’m going to try to keep the McKinney Arts name out there via private dealing and consulting and just wait for a better exhibition space.”
How things will proceed for McKinney and Yearsley, especially in a field as fickle as art, remains an open question. Yearsley is confident that Drew gave them both the tools and the faith to follow their dreams. Certainly, if the past is any predictor, she and he will be guided by the same strange force that has magnetized their lives in such strikingly similar directions.
– Marek Fuchs
Reprinted from a Winter 1998 issue of DREW Magazine