Amid the recent string of large and mid-sized gallery closures, could smaller, emerging galleries step into the power vacuum? “I 100% think they are the future,” says Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, a New York-based dealer who has previously worked at galleries including Lehmann Maupin, Canada and Pace. “This whole idea of differentiating and categorising galleries—megas, mid-tier, small—is naturally disintegrating.”
This spring, Ine-Kimba Boyle launched Gladwell Projects, a nomadic gallery with a staff of one. On 3 October, Gladwell Projects will unveil its second show, The Spirituality of Color, bringing works by chromatic innovators like Sam Gillam and Kylie Manning to a townhouse in Harlem. The gallery’s first show, The Metroplex, was staged in the collector Christie Williams’s Dallas home during the Dallas Art Fair last April. The Dallas Art Museum acquired a sculpture by Chiffon Thomas and a photograph by Clifford Prince King as a result.
Antonia Kuo, Portal, 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York
The Metroplex and The Spirituality of Color are both part of Gladwell Projects’ Domestic Interventions series of exhibitions in private homes. The brownstone that will host The Spirituality of Color stands at 124 West 131st Street, in a landmarked historic district. “It’s one of the oldest and first row houses to be built in central Harlem,” Ine-Kimba Boyle says. The house is hitting the market this month for $3.5m.
Ine-Kimba Boyle’s vision for Gladwell Projects began to take shape in 2018, when she was a recent Fordham University graduate working as a manager at Loretta Howard Gallery in Chelsea. She had studied art history and hoped to become a museum curator, but an internship at Gagosian led her into the commercial sector. Loretta Howard’s strategy of working with renowned artists like Frank Stella while foregoing fancy dinners and expensive real estate offered Ine-Kimba Boye a model she eventually returned to.
Theresa Chromati, Fuck—I Fuck Back ( Woman Births Woman ), 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Gladwell Projects, New York. Photographed by Mitro Hood
“Stepping away from my past roles was about making space for the vision I had,” Ine-Kimba Boyle says. “It was time to channel that experience into something more responsive—and to do so at a moment when the market has been yearning for change.” Although she is pursuing a nimbler format for her own business, Ine-Kimba Boyle is not advocating for a smaller-is-better approach across the board. “I've seen incredibly brilliant exhibitions at mega galleries,” she says.
She intends for Gladwell Projects to present blue-chip rigour at a scale conducive to closer community. “I think that's what a lot of collectors are sort of disillusioned from,” Ine-Kimba Boyle says. “A lot of people were questioning what they were buying into, beyond buying a piece of art.”
Jason Fox, Melmoth, 2020 Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky, New York and Los Angeles. Photographed by: Al Nowak
She initially pitched The Spirituality of Color at Pace, where she says the powers that be liked the idea but said she would need to contract an outside curator to organise the show. Ine-Kimba Boyle opted to keep the premise for herself.
The exhibition’s theme has only grown more timely amidst the current socio-political climate in the US. In this era of scatterbrained, algorithm-addicted attention spans, where abstraction is on the rise, the show charts colour’s multifaceted influence on the work of Modern and contemporary artists from Agnes Martin to Rachel Eulena Williams, both of whom are among the 19 artists represented.
Wook-Kyung Choi, Untitled, 1960s Courtesy of the artist and Tina Kim Gallery, New York
“While a lot of the stuff that we’re looking at may feel new, it's not,” Ine-Kimba Boyle says. “In a moment where, from a political sense, brown and Black folks’ contributions are being erased, I do think it's nice to put together an exhibition that tries to pick up on historical connections and contributions to the canon that have made contemporary art what it is today.”
Ine-Kimba Boyle says art and artists have become afterthoughts of sorts amid the frenzied art market calendar. With Gladwell Projects, her goal is to nurture the artists she has supported throughout her career, featuring them in her own shows and promoting their exhibitionselsewhere. She sees the art industry’s “overly competitive nature” as partly responsible for the market’s current downward trajectory.
Reginald Sylvester II, No Man Knows The Day or the Hour, 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Gladwell Projects, New York
“There’s a quiet depth to the way Christiana engages with the work,” says the New York-based artist Reginald Sylvester. The Los Angeles-based artist Brooklin A. Soumahoro adds: “She knows how to elevate the work, placing it in spaces that challenge it in the best possible way.”
Gladwell Projects—whose name commemorates Ine-Kimba Boyle’s uncle, an artist who died in the Nigerian Civil War—will eventually have a more permanent space. It will not be in trendy Tribeca, but in Harlem, where Ine-Kimba Boyle has lived for six years. For now, she plans to bring art directly to the global collector base she’s built over the past decade. “This is the most exciting period of my career,” she says.
