Fumihiro "Charlie Brown" Hayashi of The Last Gallery, Javier Peres of Peres Projects and Emily Sundblad of Reena Spaulings -- three dealers from Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York, respectively -- do a lot more than provide gallery space. They act as cheerleaders, mentors and drinking buddies to the artists they represent. Committed to keeping business authentic even during troubled times and maintaining a vision large enough to embrace the most subversive acts and radical ideas, they are THE REAL DEAL.
At first glance, it's hard to imagine that the soft-spoken artist and gallerist Emily Sundblad, clad in a white T-shirt with a tan sweater knotted around her shoulders, blonde hair up in a barrette, was once a self-described punk kid. "In high school, I had green hair for a long time, and it was shaved on the sides," she says in her delicate Swedish lilt. But it's this mix of a little bit sensible and a little bit freaky that has put Sundblad on a perch atop the New York experimental art world, as co-helmer of Reena Spaulings Fine Art, one of the premiere small galleries in New York and a prominent artist in her own right. "I think the whole punk thing was really important for me, and I really think it still informs what I do -- the whole DIY ethos. Not necessarily in an aesthetic way, but definitely in a philosophical way."
Sundblad, now 32, spent her formative years in Dalsjöfors and Stockholm. Then, at 18, she made for London, which seemed like "the natural place" to escape. In between internships at fashion magazines and nights dancing till the wee hours of the morning, she met fellow Swede and photographer Hanna Liden. "We decided we needed to do something, and we applied to college here in New York," Sundblad says. A month-long exploratory stay at the Chelsea Hotel later, the two got an apartment in Williamsburg and enrolled at Parsons, where Sundblad studied fine art and Liden photography. Upon graduating in 2002, Sundblad and Liden landed a gig curating a group show at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art (which Holland Cotter raved about in the New York Times), but Sundblad needed a way to stay in the country. So she started a business in the cheapest space she could find: a storefront on far-east Grand Street. In the beginning, Sundblad says, "there was no business plan, there was no manifesto -- there was just this space." And at that point, she recalls, "New York seemed to need more experimental gallery spaces, and there were so many artists we knew who didn't have places to exhibit." Sundblad and her boyfriend John Kelsey (a member of the fictional corporation/art collaborative Bernadette Corporation) got to work.
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