One of the more serious accusations relates to the job Higgins lined up post-Gladstone, at the studio of artist George Condo. Tananbaum and Gagosian settled, with Tananbaum issuing a play-nice statement through gritted teeth, saying, “Gagosian gallery has a terrific program.”) It’s much rarer to see low-level employees looking for legal redress from name-brand employers.īut Higgins’s accusations go well beyond claims that she was overworked, a common enough occurrence in the gallery world, where front-desk workers can stay well past 9 p.m. (Perelman’s suit was dismissed by the New York Supreme Court after a judge ruled that the billionaire beauty tycoon had not shown definitively that Gagosian was willingly manipulating prices. Art world litigation is not uncommon among its uppermost echelons-say when a collector thinks that a deal’s gone downhill-like when former Revlon chairman Ron Perelman sued Larry Gagosian and his gallery over allegedly inflated price points, or when hedge funder Steve Tananbaum sued…Gagosian’s gallery again, along with Jeff Koons, this time for allegedly failing to deliver three Koons sculptures. The lawsuit is the first in recent memory to draw such public scrutiny on the workplace drama of a Manhattan gallery, traditionally hothouses of ego and ambition where entry-level employees often forgo much in the way of pay (and sometimes dignity) for the opportunity to get a leg up in one of the global marketplace’s most cloistered and potentially lucrative fields. She now works at the Chelsea gallery Tanya Bonakdar, though not before, she says, losing out on a job at a famous artist’s studio-a move her lawsuit claims Gladstone Gallery engineered.īeyond the specific accusations, the lawsuit alleges that a gallery that represents some of the world’s greatest artists-including Matthew Barney, Carroll Dunham, Arthur Jafa, and Elizabeth Peyton-fostered a toxic environment where Higgins’s vocal complaints of wage violations and discrimination led to retaliation and caused her “mental anguish” and “emotional distress.” One of Higgins’s more serious accusations involves the search for an assistant to hire after all staffers, Gladstone included, completed anti-discriminatory and diversity training. Higgins says she was forced to leave Gladstone in retaliation for speaking up against discriminatory payment practices. In her lawsuit, Higgins claims Gladstone and her senior partner Max Falkenstein engineered a payment system that denied overtime, and that Gladstone made race-baiting comments in regard to hiring practices, among other claims. That mental image-an octogenarian cultural figure launching a gallery handbook as a staffer-targeting projectile-is just the most scandalous of a litany of allegations included in Higgins’s complaint. It was the same month, according to a lawsuit filed last week in New York State Supreme Court, that gallery founder Barbara Gladstone, 84 years old at the time, allegedly “viciously threw a thick gallery book” at the head of a former manager named Laura Higgins. An ambitious drawing survey featuring work by dozens of artists took over the grand 21st Street space, while an acclaimed show by the artist Amy Sillman took over the gallery’s 24th Street space. These would be its first shows since merging with Gavin Brown’s Enterprise to create one of New York’s most vital and varied artist rosters. In October 2020, Chelsea stalwart Gladstone Gallery had just reopened after the COVID lockdowns had shuttered much of New York’s art world six months prior.
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