We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Heiress Gallery a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Heiress thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

If we’re being completely honest, the two of us attempting to open a contemporary gallery (in Florida of all places) in and of itself has been a huge risk. Heiress is a bi-coastal operation helmed and entirely operated by us and our very new intern, so really, the entire endeavor has felt risky in many ways. At the same time, that’s part of the fun of it. We both left our previous jobs, Finn moved back to Florida from Detroit banking on the idea that Heiress would exist, we’ve made so many sacrifices, monetary and otherwise to dive headfirst into the gallery. We’ve never run our own space before so we felt like we needed to put everything we had into making this work, and figuring out our place in the art world. It’s been a ton of trial and error, even with our immense amount of combined experience we are constantly learning and finding our footing as business owners and gallery directors.

We’ve known each other for over a decade now (which is forever as 29 year olds) and we’ve wanted to do this for years. We saw a lack in the contemporary gallery world outside of the major art-hub cities, and during the pandemic came into the means to actually make it happen. From day one we have consistently put everything into this. Every day. Our time, our energy, sometimes it feels entirely consuming and absolutely demanding. But at the end of the day we’re grateful that the work in front of us is ours. That we get to wake up and choose to do this even if it all goes wayside in the end. “High risk, high reward” as they say and so far it’s all been worth it.

Heiress, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We think its special to mention that we met during our first week as undergrads in art school back in 2o12. We were there to pursue our own careers as artists. I don’t think that many 18 year olds really think much about Arts Administration in terms of a career goal. We certainly weren’t at that time.

Between our time in school and then our separate careers afterwards, we gained mountains of experience. Between the two of us we’ve done pretty much every job you could possibly have in the art world. This gave us such a well rounded perspective into what makes museums, art fairs, and galleries tick. The ecosystem is so incredibly delicate, the etiquette is so specific. In the last decade we’ve spent most of our time learning to navigate that and all of the intricacies that come with existing in these fine art spheres. All of that is also to say, that we’ve also been able to learn what we wanted to do differently with Heiress.

The most important thing for us is that we approach our business model with ethics and fun being at the forefront of our concerns. The economics of art has the capacity to be incredibly predatory towards everyone involved, the artists, collectors, down to people like the janitorial staff. If we can operate in a way that expresses our genuine care for every person we work with, at every level, that already feels like we’re succeeding in shifting the way we engage with the paradigm of the larger art world. Not that people in this field don’t typically care, because individually, they do, so much. But the system itself can often make that care hard to translate into reality. Part of the beauty of Heiress being such a small operation is that we’re able to give so much time, attention, and transparency to the artists and collectors we work with. We’re able to build genuine relationships rather than purely transactional ones and it makes such a huge difference to the way we operate.

On a similar but different note, It feels necessary to mention that we approach the curating of our space as a creative practice. Every group show is meticulously planned out and researched. For solo shows we work with our artists for months and months to ensure that the work has specific purpose or direction. While we appreciate “art for art’s sake” or purely aesthetic work, it isn’t what excites us. There’s so much that art can be used to talk about and we find ourselves deeply disinterested in the idea of showing work that refuses to engage in meaningful dialogue.

Heiress is still young. We’re at a stage where we’re just beginning to get wings and gain substantial footing in our communities. We would say the thing we’re most proud of so far is that we started Heiress with an incredible amount of vulnerability. We put the entirety of ourselves into it and held nothing back. Through doing that, it feels like people have sensed how much love and care we put into everything we do, and we never cease to be absolutely moved and humbled by the outpouring of support we’ve been shown so far. This response reminds us that it is still possible to do things that have real impact and has us excited to continue pushing forward with huge and endless ideas for community events, group and solo exhibitions, public programming, and client engagement.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

As artists who also fill the role of gallerists, we are fortunate enough to constantly work with and be in the presence of other artists and creative people, The process of collaboration itself is incredibly fulfilling. Being able to put together shows, events, workshops, things that benefit the larger community through a creative lens is one of the most driving aspects of what we do. It’s also something we couldn’t do it without the help and inspiration of the creative minded people we work with. We like the idea that “everyone comes up together” and fostering an environment that promotes that possibility is foundational to the overall goal of Heiress, At the end of the day its like, you can’t make it in this field on your own, and more so than that, why would you want to?

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

This is such a funny question because we are in a constant flux between learning and unlearning at all times. So much of our combined experience comes from working for and under other people. In some ways this is really great because that foundation is how we’ve been able to figure out how we want to exist in the world, or it at least has given us the ability to define a sort of structure to use as a guide while we continue to figure everything out! At the same time, a lot of the “unlearning” comes in where we separate ourselves from the more rigid aspects of our prior experiences. So things like, unlearning certain power dynamics within our interpersonal relationships as they pertain to the gallery, unlearning certain sales tactics or ways of engaging with emerging artists that feel predatory. Even unlearning certain tastes and sensibilities that we’ve picked up from the various people/institutions that we’ve worked under, and really distilling our aesthetic vision to exactly what we want and have envisioned for ourselves.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.heiressgallery.com/
• Instagram: heiress.gallery

Image Credits
Image 1: Artists left to right; Walter Matthews & Joss Melgar Image 2: Aritsts left to right; Creighton Baxter & Paul Pfeiffer Image 3: Gallery owners left to right; Finn Schult & Erica Luedtke Image 4: Opening night of Heiress’ first exhibition, Running Through the Sawgrass Image 5: Artist; Miki Aurora Image 6: Artist; Elliot Avis Image 7: Artist; Emmett Freeman Image 8: Artist; Trinity Oribio