It has been an entire year since I led a gallery tour in Soho, the origin of many legendary, ground-breaking galleries, but that drought will come to an end on Sat. April 21 at 1:00 PM, when I lead my next Soho gallery tour. And it may be another year before I lead the next such tour, so TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS ONE while you can, whatever the weather turns out to be, and whatever your tentative other plans.

Why have I waited this long, when I lead a scheduled gallery tour every week in different parts of town? It’s not that I haven’t been visiting Soho galleries on my own all these months – I have. It’s just that now that Soho is down to 25 galleries (compared with 300 galleries in Chelsea and 120 in the Lower East Side), I was waiting for the right time when there would be enough extraordinary exhibits in Soho at the same time, to make the tour worth leading.

Well, the time is NOW.  Highlights of my April 21 tour will include: (1) a Chinese artist’s massive 34-screen video installation that is arranged on the ceiling as though each screen is a star in the heavens, (2) a female artist’s gorgeous large-scale “cocoons” and “nests” made of tree roots, handmade paper, gold mica, and even algae, and (3) artist Colby Bird, who will speak to our group when we visit his show of unorthodox photography. These are just 3 of 7 exhibits we’ll visit that day.

Soho, of course, used to be the world’s center for contemporary art, until most of its galleries moved en masse to Chelsea in the 1990s, when real estate prices in Soho skyrocketed, and Chelsea could offer much larger industrial-sized spaces for a lot less money. But there are still galleries left in Soho, and sometimes even a new one sprouts up. To take one example, Team Gallery not only moved from Chelsea BACK to Soho a few years ago, but this past year they opened up a SECOND space in Soho just two blocks away. They’re the exception, of course, but it does show that Soho remains a desirable neighborhood for the art world. Maybe TOO desirable, which is why Soho is still so expensive.

Besides the wonderfully innovative “downtown” art you’ll see on the Soho tour, the neighborhood itself is about the most charming of any in Manhattan. I hope you make your way to this Saturday’s Soho tour, because there’s no telling when the next one will be.

Rafael Risemberg, Ph.D.
Founder and Director
New York Gallery Tours