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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We've had an amazing set of interviews for our Black Art History Month series this February. We spoke to artists Ming Smith, Senga Nengudi, Alison Saar, and Faheem Majeed. We heard about the Black potters exhibit at The MET and the New-York Historical Society. We remembered Winfred Rembert with his widow, Patsy, and spoke to the first Black woman to have a nationally-syndicated comic strip.

Today, we finish the series with someone who is one of a handful of Black female gallery owners. The first in the Chelsea District. Nicola Vassell opened her own space in 2021 on 10th Avenue in 18th Street after years of honing her craft and connections at other major galleries and working with some major art collectors. Nicola Vassell, welcome to the show.

Nicola Vassell: Thank you. Thank you so much, Alison. It's wonderful to be here. The show of enlightenment and good citizenship.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Do you remember or what do you remember about your earliest impression of what art is or art was?

Nicola Vassell: Yes. Well, I grew up in Jamaica, the island of Jamaica. Looking back at my early childhood, I remember that art was inherent. It was everywhere. Of course, music being the mainstay of the larger cultural expression, but Jamaicans want to be incredibly expressive. Visual resonance is very important. Creative expression is very important, so arts in general felt very natural to me and something that was baked in.

Alison Stewart: When did you realize you wanted to head to New York City?

Nicola Vassell: Oh, I actually understood that from early in my teens. I was described as a quite willful child and something about the normative structure of life at home didn't really appeal to me. I understood that I would have to venture outwards. At a certain point, New York just seemed like the most exciting place to do that. I pursued that idea quite vigorously to my poor mother's chagrin.

Alison Stewart: I was going to say, now that you're an adult, what does willful child mean to you? What did they really mean? [chuckles]

Nicola Vassell: Yes, no, willful children have to be understood and appreciated for an actual sense of self-determination. I think that that's the translation as an adult. Perhaps at a young age, it's not in a form that can be easily understood. I do think that often, we're granted by the gods or by the universal wisdom with certain traits and characteristics. I think willfulness, when properly shaped, really is the bedrock of self-determination.

Alison Stewart: Yes, I know. I've talked to other parents about that and they've said, "You don't want to break a kid's will. You want to support it and enhance it, but also channel it the right way."

Nicola Vassell: Exactly. Some parents can misunderstand that and try to impose their will. I think it's a fine balance.

Alison Stewart: What do you consider your big break in the art scene in New York, that first moment that you know you wouldn't be sitting here today if that moment hadn't happened?

Nicola Vassell: I have to say it was when my very first boss, Jeffrey Deitch, took a chance on bringing me into his program and hiring me and allowing me to work with the gallery. I'd had a life in New York prior to that point. I think I'd been in New York about eight years by then. I was very involved with the downtown scene. I had come as a model to New York City, and so I was very involved with fashion, but I really enjoyed avant-garde parts of it.

I suppose that was the early permutations of a life destined towards us channeling creative talent into the world. I understood that Jeffrey was a hub for many things. Very interesting performance. He also absolutely welcomed the fashion crowd. He's a great scholar of art history also, but he was a very big risk-taker and frankly populated his community and his immediate surroundings, the staff, with very interesting, unusual, and ultimately very fertile personalities. I would say Jeffrey really saying, "Let's go for it," and passing his knowledge along, that was a big break for me.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Nicola Vassell. She is a gallery owner of the eponymous Nicola Vassell Gallery on 10th Avenue around 18th Street. It's interesting because working with Jeffrey Deitch, that's a big deal early in one's career. What is something that you learned during that experience that you still come back to today?

Nicola Vassell: Wow, that's a great question. I have to say there were many things I learned from Jeffrey that I still carry and pull out of the toolbox. One of the most important things is to constantly look, to never give up on one's curiosity, because looking really makes you understand how to see and continuously seeking out talent and keeping one's ear to the street, trying to get a sense of who the interesting artists are, what they're making, and how that relates meaningfully to the ripples that are pulsing through society, also how to be a good relationship-builder with clients, and how absolutely to form a community of artists. Very much anchored by a kind of unyielding support of artists and their ambitions. I'm trying to think up a few things as we go along, but those stand out to me.

Alison Stewart: I'm glad you brought up artists' relationships. The New York Times did a profile of you and they described your first major relationship with an artist was with Kehinde Wiley.

Nicola Vassell: That's right.

Alison Stewart: Of course, he did President Obama's portrait and has an amazing piece in the Brooklyn Museum. How did you meet? What did you see?

Nicola Vassell: We met in his studio. It was right when I just started working with Jeffrey and he had landed on the cover of Art in America. It was a wonderful profile written by the incredibly brilliant professor, Sarah Lewis. It felt like the beginnings of a very strong community. I remember so vividly that night in his studio in Chelsea on 23rd Street.

It became very clear to me shortly after meeting him that there was not a force in the world that would stop Kehinde because he was a force himself and that he had absolutely ambitions to speak to the world in his own voice and to really present the ideas that are the foundation of his practice into the world, which at the time, it's more commonplace now. A lot of the things that Kehinde aimed for. At the time, it was fairly novo in the context of that period. There was nothing that was going to stop him. He too is willful and, without question, a force of nature.

Alison Stewart: During the course of your career, you were a director at one of the blue-chip galleries, Pace. You had your own consultancy and you worked with The Dean Collection, which is this amazing family art collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. In your work with them, you did something called the No Commission project. I thought this was really interesting. Could you explain this project and the origin of the initiative?

Nicola Vassell: Oh, absolutely. When No Commission launched, I was a couple of years into my consultancy. I was really looking for unusual projects. Having spent my time in the gallery, white cube setting, I really wanted to go out into the world and have some conversations. Kasseem, Alicia, they are incredibly generous. They love connecting with community and spreading messages.

At the time, he really felt strongly about the artists' position in the economic framework of the art ecosystem. It was a marriage of a number of aims. Namely, No Commission was a music festival, an art fair kind of married together. How we presented it was through-- It was an invitational, so it was a curated project. We invited artists to participate. We would have the fair and festival for about three to four days.

We would sell works and the artists would keep 100% of the earnings, hence the title, "No Commission." A number of things were achieved. Obviously, Kasseem and Alicia being music people, they were really able to tap into their frameworks and bring incredible talent to this fore. Of course, we really had an opportunity to invite artists to do something they hadn't done.

There was a huge economic benefit on the back end. I think we ticked a couple of very interesting boxes and we took it all around the world over a number of years. We did it, of course, here nationally in New York. We did it in the Bronx, which is Kasseem's home, part of the city. We did it in Miami. We also took it to London. We went as far as Shanghai. We were in Berlin. It was fabulous.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Nicola Vassell. That's the name of her gallery as well. Nicola, when did you know you were going to open your own gallery? What void did you know you wanted to fill?

Nicola Vassell: I'm so glad you asked that question on the heels of No Commission because, by the time we closed out that project, I was pretty exhausted. I felt I'd hit a ceiling, my curiosity ceiling in terms of running around and trying to have these conversations. At a certain point, I had a yearning for the early days, going back to a very much traditional way of operating in the art world while understanding that the world had really changed since then.

That occurred to me to be a very interesting prospect. At the same time, I realized that there would be an efficiency to consolidating all those efforts into one place. I'm a Virgo, so I love efficiencies. It was my logical mind initially veering towards the notion of efficiency. At a certain point, I realized that myself and my amazing team, we could really use this as a quietly revolutionary platform.

Alison Stewart: Your very first show was with someone who was actually a recent guest on this show, Ming Smith. Why did you want Ming's show to be your first? Her photography is spectacular, but there must have been something about her and your relationship with her that this would be your first show in your gallery.

Nicola Vassell: [laughs] Yes, amazing. Ming and I have a very interesting story. Our beginnings are really unlike any other beginning I had with an artist. Ming and I danced together for many years. We were doing Afro-Cuban together at Ailey Extension, sometimes Geneva. I knew her in the context of dance. I hadn't made the connection at that point that she was the Ming Smith that I went on to know.

At a certain point, actually, at one of our earliest No Commissions, a great mutual friend of ours, Sherry Bronfman connected us. When I understood what this was, I said, "Oh, my goodness, this is a brilliant diamond hidden away." Ming and I just spent time forging over a number of years prior to opening the gallery. A very wonderful relationship and sisterhood. We would dance. We would go eat. We lived in Harlem together. We went to the park. It was very much a sisterhood. She was integral to the fortitude that was required to open this gallery.

She was very much a support system. At a certain point, as she began to peel back the layers of her archive, I was just astonished even further that Ming is really a once-in-a-generation kind of artist. You have different kinds of artists. She is of the slant that is really gifted by the gods somehow. She's having a conversation in some other paradigm that allows her to see how she sees and create how she creates, given the minuscule opportunity that any actual image affords you when you're taking that photograph.

I understood that she was channeling something and that she needed to be heard simply because of that power. In a sense, Ming really represented her five decades of adventure, fearlessness, curiosity as a woman, as a woman of color in the world, traveling, capturing, and then alchemically shifting what photography even looks like and feels like. I understood that she was the underline, right? She was the embodiment of what we hope to achieve with the gallery. There was no question in my mind, she was going to be our inaugural show for that reason.

Alison Stewart: You should go check out Nicola Vassell's Gallery at 18th Street and 10th Avenue. Nicola, thank you so much for making time for us today. We really appreciate it.

Nicola Vassell: Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you for your good work and keep it up. Support public radio, everyone.

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It.

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