lystn

NYC gallerist (and artist) Scott Ogden talks about: His Chinatown gallery Shrine, a 350 sq. ft space, and how to make that work; his unusual program of roughly half outsider artists and half contemporary artists; how he first got interested in outsider art when he sat in on a slide show lecture about prison art while a BFA student at the University of Texas, Austin; how the sexually provocative work of Yves Tessier was the first show to bring in significant neighborhood traffic to the gallery, including many non-English speaking locals; how he addresses potential issues of cultural appropriation/colonialism; his experiences doing art fairs, including the Outsider Art Fair, as well as NADA in Miami, where he met several new collectors; the synchronistic circumstances that led him to leasing his first (and current) gallery space (which wasn’t originally his intention), whose remnants included stripper poles and other odds and ends; how he transitioned from artist to gallerist/businessperson overnight, and what the growing pains have been like; how he uses Instagram both to sell work and to find gallery interns; and how he loves finding work that teeters on the edge between crazy brilliant and crazy bad.