Artist Sues Downtown New York Gallery, Alleging That He Wasn’t Paid for Sold Artworks

Artist Jonathan Bruce Williams sued New York’s Kai Matsumiya last month, alleging that the gallery still owes him more than $16,000 for two artworks that sold from his 2025 show there.

Located near Tribeca, one of the city’s most densely populated gallery districts, Kai Matsumiya was founded in 2014 and has shown artists such as Steffani Jemison, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, and Hadi Fallapisheh. The gallery’s exhibitions have earned acclaim from critics, with a 2020 Surface profile terming the space the “New York Art Gallery Where Anything Can Happen”; the gallery won the Armory Show’s Gramercy International Prize that year.

Filed in the Civil Court of the City of New York, Williams’s lawsuit claims that two pieces from his exhibition were sold to an art collection stewarded by the University of Chicago Booth School of
Business for a total of $22,600. Williams says he had agreed to split that money with the gallery in advance, with Kai Matusmiya keeping 50 percent. His show closed on November 1, 2025.

After the works were placed with the school’s art collection, Williams made “repeated requests for
payment,” the lawsuit says, but the gallery “failed and refused to remit the amounts owed.” The suit alleges that Matsumiya was given a formal demand for payment in May and that the artist still did not receive payment.

Williams is now seeking $16,441.41, an amount that he says also accounts for fabrication and shipping costs.

A lawyer for Williams declined to comment. Reached by ARTnews, Kai Matsumiya, the gallery’s founding dealer, said that Williams had now been paid and the matter was now resolved. The lawsuit appears to still be pending.