Eric Firestone to Open Fifth Gallery in West Palm Beach

Eric Firestone is expanding south. The dealer will open his fifth gallery space, this time in West Palm Beach in mid-November, adding a permanent South Florida location to his two spaces in New York and two in East Hampton. The new gallery, at 2412 Florida Avenue, will occupy a warehouse space near the Norton Museum of Art. 

For Firestone, who grew up in Miami and left South Florida in 1989, the move is both a homecoming and a bet on a region he’s familiar with as an art dealer. “I was just really kind of doing enough business down there,” Firestone told ARTnews of his reasoning. “I had enough friends and family down there that it just made sense to me.” 

Firestone has watched plenty of galleries descend on wealthy seasonal enclaves, particularly during the pandemic, only to retreat once the moment passed. He isn’t interested in doing the same. Instead, he’s opting to follow a different model, one he himself has cultivated, out East at his East Hampton locations for the past 16 years.

“To really make a gallery work in a community like that, you have to be open for most of the year and be accessible,” he said. “People know you’re a go-to in the community.” 

There is also some fairly straightforward arithmetic behind the expansion even in a difficult art market, which has seen galleries reduce their footprints or close altogether. Firestone said the cost of maintaining the West Palm Beach gallery for most of the year, closing only during the quiet summer months, works out to roughly what he would spend participating in two international art fairs. “This isn’t a loss leader for me,” he said. “If I’m doing this, I have to produce. My business has to produce.” 

Firestone said he never considered opening another New York location or expanding to Los Angeles, as other colleagues have done, preferring to ship his inventory up and down the East Coast over operating a bicoastal gallery. 

West Palm Beach will also operate somewhat differently from his other locations. Rather than relying on a conventional calendar of solo and two-person exhibitions, Firestone plans something closer to a continuously changing “salon or showroom” where he’ll be mixing historical material with work by younger artists.

“I want to create an experience in there,” he said. “I don’t mind showing a younger artist where the market is just starting to get going or early legs up against an historic work that’s really established.”

The idea fits neatly with his gallery program, which has increasingly become associated with resurrecting the work of postwar American artists, including Joe Overstreet, Thomas Sills, Marcia Marcus, Martha Edelheit, and Pat Passlof, with a focus on institutional acquisitions.

Passlof offers perhaps the clearest example. Firestone has represented her estate since 2020, mounting his first exhibition of her work the following year and a sold-out solo presentation at Frieze Masters in 2022. Over the past decade, her paintings have entered collections including the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Crystal Bridges, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. 

On September 9, Firestone will open “After Magic: Early Works by Pat Passlof: 1948–1962” at his Great Jones Street gallery. The exhibition includes around 35 small paintings and two monumental canvases, beginning with the summer she spent studying under Willem de Kooning at Black Mountain College. Passlof was hardly an outsider. She helped renovate the Eighth Street loft that became the first home of the Artists’ Club, co-founded the March Gallery in 1956, and had a solo exhibition at Dick Bellamy’s Green Gallery in 1961. Yet her name never achieved the familiarity of many of her male contemporaries. 

That gap is just the kind of thing that interests Firestone. He said younger artists in particular have become increasingly curious about historical work beyond the familiar names that dominate textbooks and museum collections. “There’s these other voices during these periods that were making work that was radical,” he said. “That’s where we have a lot of fun as a gallery, just putting this examination to the test.” 

After 33 years in the business, Firestone said expansion also serves a less complicated purpose: keeping himself interested. “I still have a little bit of a shoot-from-the-hip mentality,” he said. “You do this long enough, you got to keep it fresh for yourself. There’s so many dealers that look like they’re just going through the motions—boring.”