Embrace Your ‘Naive Confidence’ and 4 Other Tips for Young Art Dealers From Jasmin Tsou, Owner of New York’s JTT Gallery

Jasmine Tsou, who runs the gallery JTT in New York’s Lower East
Side, first realized she might be better suited for a career as a
dealer than an artist when her fellow students’ work at New York
University’s studio arts program started to interest her more than
her own

“My artwork ended up being reports about other people’s work,”
she told artnet News. After college, she spent a semester teaching
at NYU in Shanghai before entering the gallery world, with stints
at Maccarone and Kimmerich galleries. Seven years ago, at age 27,
Tsou opened the first iteration of JTT, in a small storefront on
the Lower East Side. Four years later, she expanded into a larger
space on a second floor on Chrystie Street, where her dynamic
program of emerging artists has become a much buzzed-about spot on
the scene.

Tsou, now 34, spoke to artnet News about her five essential tips
for aspiring gallerists and artists looking to make it in the
industry.

1. Take Risks

In 2011, when Tsou was first exploring the possibility of life
as an independent curator, she met for coffee with Matthew
Higgs, director of the alternative art space White Columns. “He was
someone I admired a lot for being able to make a career out of
that,” she says. But Higgs advised her against becoming a curator
and suggested she instead open her own gallery. He also offered
some practical advice for a starting point: Rent a booth in the
special project space at that year’s NADA art fair in Miami, then
priced at a very reasonable $2,000. Tsou cobbled together the money
for a booth, where she showed work by 17 artists, including Elaine
Cameron-Weir, Felipe Jesus Consalvos, Vaginal Davis, Rebecca
Kolsrud, Andres Laracuente, Bob Mizer, and Bill Walton. She sold
enough work that she could begin thinking about next steps.

2. Get Creative

Tsou was crashing in a spare room in a house owned by her
brother to cut back on living costs when she secured a storage
space with a storefront on Suffolk Street for “pretty cheap rent,”
she says. “The gallery space was very very small. I wasn’t really
able to have staff or even have guests come to just sit and talk.”
But she took advantage of its ground-floor location to organize
“some really great, ambitious projects,” such as a large pipe work
by Charles Harlan that she removed a large window to
install. “In the beginning when you don’t have a lot to lose,
you can have a sort of naive confidence. I was lucky to have that,”
she says.

3. Don’t
Hate the Fairs

“Fairs for a young gallery are very different than for an older
gallery. We’re mostly doing solo presentations and introducing an
artist to a community that doesn’t know anything about them,” Tsou
says Tsou who has so far participated in Art Basel editions in
Miami, Hong Kong, and Switzerland, and will appear at the next
iteration of FIAC in Paris, where she’ll presenting a solo booth of
work by Jamian Juliano Villani. It’s a huge investment to make in
an artist’s career, she says. “It definitely takes up to half a
year, or sometimes a year, for that investment to pay off. But it
does.” It’s a testament to the fact that, even in the digital age,
“personal relationships are still the most important part of our
business.”

4. Understand the Artist and the
Collector

Tsou jokes that the reason she was the one among her artist
friends in college who became a dealer is because “I was better at
bullshitting, and definitely better at interfacing with the world
at large.” But she’s also proven adept at working with artists,
particularly those just starting who might be intimidated by the
prospect of navigating the art world. “It’s important for a young
artist to feel that things are approachable, that they can share
their own story, or whatever it is they are interested in or care
about. You have to trust that your perspective or the artist’s
perspective is important and worth being considered. It starts
there.”

5. Build a Community of Artists

Tsou says she emphasizes to artists that “it’s much more likely
that they will have success if they can build a community of
artists that they can grow with instead of approaching dealers they
don’t know or have relationships with.” Tsou says she sees the
artists in her program as “complementing” one another, but what
she’s looking for changes from one year to the next. “I really care
a lot about the formal qualities of the object. Things have to be
very stimulating visually, and concept and politics often follows
that.”

The next show at JTT, “Elaine Cameron-Weir: strings that
show the wind,” opens September 8 at 191 Chrystie Street.

The post Embrace Your ‘Naive Confidence’ and 4 Other Tips
for Young Art Dealers From Jasmin Tsou, Owner of New York’s JTT
Gallery appeared first on artnet News.