NEW YORK – It’s a mild late-winter morning as Nancy Margolis steps from the cab on a busy street in Chelsea. She pays her fare and walks up a short flight of stairs to begin another day doing what she loves most.
It’s been almost 20 years since Margolis traded her art gallery space on Fore Street in Portland for the chance to run a gallery in Manhattan, the most competitive art market in North America, if not the world.
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So far, so good. Margolis is thriving, and has turned her namesake gallery into one of New York’s finest. She features many Maine artists in her shows, and remains one of the biggest promoters of contemporary Maine art outside the state.
After all these years, she still finds it somewhat remarkable that she had the gumption to leave Portland for New York.
“I never expected to do all this,” she said during a gallery visit last week. “I never had a master plan. One thing kept leading to another.”
It all started at Bates College. Margolis came to Bates from Massachusetts to study in the late 1940s. She became interested in ceramics, thanks to the wife of a faculty member who offered a clay class out of her home. It was her first hands-on art experience, and it lit a fire that burns hot today.
Margolis graduated from Bates in 1952, and went about the business of settling down and raising a family. But as soon as her fourth and final child was born, she went back to art.
At first, she was interested in making art. She took classes and fancied herself a pretty decent ceramacist — so much so that during a winter trip to Ogunquit, she noticed a building for rent at Perkins Cove.
It was a perfect location for a gallery, and Margolis wanted a place to sell her own work. She rented it and operated a seasonal gallery for 13 years. She later opened a year-round gallery in a former firehouse in Auburn that she bought and rehabbed. The building also included a restaurant, though that business enterprise was less successful.
Margolis closed the Auburn space and eventually ended up on Fore Street in Portland, down near the corner of Market Street.
She did well in Portland, but always felt a desire to do more. New York beckoned. She closed the Portland gallery in the mid-’90s, and has been in the Big Apple since.
“I moved because I felt my assets and the things I was most interested in I could not do in Maine. I felt I could do it in New York,” she said. “I felt I could have the kind of gallery I really wanted here.”
It was a business decision, and it has proven to be a good one.
Over the course of 18 years, Margolis has moved her New York gallery three times, from Chelsea to Soho and now back to Chelsea. Her current gallery is at 523 W. 25th St., and she has been there seven years.
Chelsea is the hot spot for galleries in New York these days, and Margolis is in the thick of it. She was an original tenant in a renovated industrial building, and now is surrounded by galleries in a neighborhood that has more art destinations than any other neighborhood in the city, if anywhere.
“If you go from 19th up to 28th between 10th and 11th avenues, you will find an extraordinary area,” she said. “Every building is filled with art. There is a gallery or studio space in virtually every building. I don’t think there is anyplace else in the world you can go from gallery to gallery on every street.”
Margolis’ roster includes many artists from Maine and those with Maine roots, but by no means does she focus exclusively on Maine art. In recent years, she has shown work by Scott Davis, Anna Hepler, Henry Wolyniec, Noa Warren, Garry Mitchell, Andrea Sulzer and Jacob Ouillette, among others.
She relies on old friends Bruce Brown and June Fitzpatrick to recommend Maine artists who are ready to show in New York. Margolis owns a condo in Falmouth and manages to get back to Maine most every summer, so she does some scouting herself.
Looking back, she realizes now that she has always been ahead of her time. If she had waited a few years, the Portland gallery scene might have caught up with her, and she might not have felt compelled to move to New York to do what she loves.
“I’m certainly not cutting-edge,” she said. “If you walk around New York, you will see work in galleries that is truly cutting-edge. But my aesthetics were more cutting-edge than what I think people were interested in in Maine, at least at the time I was there.”
She has no regrets, and after all these years, Margolis is as much a New Yorker as the next person — maybe even more so. She took a risk, left what was safe and familiar, and came to a place known to chew people up.
She has mastered New York, and done so with class and dignity. “I still have to pinch myself sometimes,” she says. “I plan to stay as long as I am able.”
Staff Writer Bob Keyes can be contacted at 791-6457 or at:
bkeyes@pressherald.com
Follow him on Twitter at:
twitter.com/bkeyes
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