Although only 15% of the Society of London Art Dealers’ 134 member galleries are directed or owned by women, there are now several female experts in their mid-to-late 30s who are choosing to start their own art dealing businesses.
“I do think that sometimes women are more reluctant than men to break out and actually go it alone,” says Lyndsey Ingram, 37, who—with two female colleagues—is leaving London’s Sims Reed Gallery in March after 14 years to start her own Modern and contemporary prints gallery.
Meanwhile, after nine years working for the sculpture dealer Robert Bowman, Abby Hignell opened her own 20th- and 21st-century sculpture gallery in Mayfair’s Shepherd Market in January.
Last summer, she was approached by the entrepreneur and art collector Waheed Alli, who became her backer. She met Alli, dubbed “Lord Hunch”, through mutual friends.
Individual ambitions Hignell wasn’t scared of failure: “I’m 38 and I reached a point where I stopped thinking ‘What can I do’ and started thinking ‘What do I want to be doing’,” she says. She has been “overwhelmed by goodwill” from her peers at galleries including Sladmore, Osborne Samuel and Pangolin London.
Arcadia Cerri, also 38, worked for the Medieval art specialist Sam Fogg for 11 years before setting up her own company in September 2013, dealing in early European art––particularly sculpture–– from home. She had a child soon after starting the business and hopes to have another before expanding the company by investing in art fairs and, eventually, a gallery.
Hignell and Cerri agree that, as a woman, gaining the respect of clients can be difficult. Cerri was 25 when she started working for Fogg and, while her gender made no difference to him, occasionally clients would give her “a side glance before listening to me”, she says.
She learnt “to look and act as soberly as possible in order to be taken seriously”, but even after ten years found visitors would approach her younger male assistant first at fairs.
She is philosophical: “No doubt there will be people with age and gender-based prejudice but if you are a good dealer they will lose out in the long run.”
Cerri admires older dealers such as Francesca Galloway, Joanna Booth and Sandra Hindman, and Ingram is also grateful for female role models. “Maybe it shouldn’t matter that they are women, but it does,” she says.
Scene changes While Hignell, Cerri and Ingram cut their teeth at established Mayfair and St James’s dealers, Jessica Carlisle, 36, was a solicitor before working as an artist agent, then as a gallery director. She started holding pop-up, contemporary art exhibitions in 2014, and opens a permanent space in Marylebone in March, with the support of business partner Victoria Golembiovskaya. The decision is “in equal parts invigorating and terrifying”, she says. Her opening exhibition is a solo show of the artist Katrina Blannin (11 March-9 April).
Far from considering themselves feminist causes célèbres, what unites all four of these women is a belief that their sex should not mark their businesses out as different. Yet they also share a quiet pride in striking out alone as women. As Hignell says, “It’s that feminist mantra of ‘You cannot be what you cannot see.’ So to be here and inspire others to do the same, I’m terribly proud of that.”
