Once a month during the gallery season I hold a contest between three Manhattan gallery neighborhoods – Soho, the Upper East Side, and the Midtown Skyscrapers galleries –  to determine which neighborhood is showing the best art, and therefore where a particular week’s gallery tour will take place. And the contest winner for my Sat. Oct. 6 gallery tour is … the Upper East Side galleries!   This is the first time since March 2012 that the Upper East Side galleries have come in first place, and therefore the first time in over 6 months that an Upper East Side gallery tour will be on my itinerary.   So take advantage of this tour, since who knows how long it will take before the U.E.S. wins again.

Up until two weeks ago, the contest was neck-and-neck between Soho and the Upper East Side, with two things tipping the balance in favor of the uptown galleries.  One was that the U.E.S. had the single most extraordinary exhibit in any of those three neighborhoods: a young French artist’s brand-new room-sized glass works installed in the single most exquisite gallery mansion in the city – a stunner of a show!  And the other major factor was that several of Soho’s best exhibits were not slated to close for another month, making Soho the leading contender for the contest for the Nov. 3 gallery tour.  All of the Upper East Side exhibits, by contrast, were set to close in mid-to-late October.

And so the Upper East Side it is, at least for this coming week.  As a bonus, more than half the shows we’ll visit on the Oct. 6 tour will be housed in legendary Upper East Side mansions that have been converted to galleries, including my 3 very favorite mansion galleries.  Some of those mansions have but 2 or 3 shows a year and remain closed the rest of the season, so we’re fortunate to have so many of them open at once, and showing interesting exhibits to boot.

As posh and venerated as these mansions are, you may be surprised to learn that the art they’re showing this particular week is all fresh and contemporary. Just the way I like it.

Rafael Risemberg, Ph.D.
Founder and Director
New York GalleryTours