Nearly a year ago, Magda Sawon shut the doors of Tribeca’s Postmasters Gallery after losing a dispute with her landlord over pandemic rent payments. The closure could have been devastating, but for Sawon, who co-founded the gallery in 1984 with her partner Tamas Banovich, it represented an opportunity to start fresh with a new type of art gallery model.
“After 38 years of essentially kind of pioneering various neighborhoods and being a part of those scenes, we decided it’s time to experiment,” Sawon told Observer. Postmasters has since gone nomadic, in a venture Sawon refers to as “Postmasters 5.0.”
Since the gallery lost its Tribeca space in August, it has rented buildings across the city in order to hold pop-up exhibitions. While the untraditional move has caused logistical challenges for the gallery and has been a tough change to embrace for some of its artists, Sawon claims the transition to the roving model has been an exciting change. “I think I would be bored to death not doing this.”
The gallery saturation in some Manhattan neighborhoods has always been an issue for Postmasters, according to Sawon, who grew up in Warsaw, Poland, where she earned a master’s degree in art history before moving to the U.S. in 1981. “You could put a tracker on us and it would point out the art neighborhoods of New York City, starting from the 80s.”
After opening Postmasters in Manhattan’s East Village, the contemporary art gallery moved to Soho in 1989 and then left the “gentrified, crowded neighborhood” nearly a decade later to set up shop in Chelsea, according to Sawon.
But when the Chelsea lease ended in 2013, rising rent prices prompted Sawon to move the gallery once again, this time to Tribeca, “which was way ahead of any wave,” she said.
Why did Postmasters become Postmasters 5.0?
In recent years, Tribeca has become one of the most desirable neighborhoods for art galleries, with real estate surging in value.
Postmasters lost a court case in 2022 after its landlord sued the gallery for rent that went unpaid during the Covid-19 pandemic. Even then, there was still a possibility Postmasters could remain in its Tribeca location, according to Sawon.
“But at that point, it became very clear to me that given our predilection for experiments and art that is not fully embraced by the market, it would be an incredibly heavy burden to carry a space at those prices,” she said.
Postmasters has long been an early adopter of non-traditional artwork focused on technological change. In 1999, the gallery exhibited Netomat, a communications software program created by Maciej Wisniewski, and in 2010, it showcased Eva and Franco Mattes’ performances on the online video chat platform Chatroulette.
Elements of experimental technology are prevalent in Postmasters’ newest show, Machine Violence. The exhibition, which had a portion of its press release written by ChatGPT, includes 3D printed plastic works by Gracelee Lawrence, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) from Eddo Stern and Miltos Manetas and Instagram filters from Huntrezz Janos.
“It’s certainly a model in which we can commit to work that is not yet 100 percent market embraced,” said Sawon.
Machine Violence, which runs through May 30, is located in a former carpentry shop in Noho. The brick-walled ground floor room was purposefully left “raw and unfiltered,” said Sawon, adding that Postmasters found the space about a month before the show’s opening night.
“I think a lot of art doesn’t really need to have this hospital sterility of the space,” she said, adding that she wanted to present the artwork under “conditions that are slightly more real and slightly different from this homogeneity of how all the galleries look.”
Since going nomadic, Postmasters opened two shows in September and January, both of which were held in locations in Soho. “I make jokes that between shows, I become a streetwalker,” said Sawon. “With every exhibition, I have to go block by block, up and down, and make note of empty space.”
Finding spaces for pop-up shows hasn’t been a challenge for Postmasters; locating empty buildings has been easy in part due to the pandemic’s effect on commercial real estate in New York City. The gallery, which has a branch in Rome, is also hoping to put on two shows in Los Angeles.
What are the challenges of going nomadic?
While Postmasters previously held eight to ten shows annually, with Sawon estimating a total of nearly 400 exhibitions since its founding, it has only held three since losing its physical gallery.
Despite taking a hit from the loss of revenue from exhibitions, Sawon claims the gallery’s profits have remained relatively steady due to its decreased operational expenses. “It’s pretty much an even-Steven deal,” she told Observer.
The gallery’s experimental changes have also led to the loss of artist David Diao, who was represented by Postmasters since its founding and left for Chelsea’s Greene Naftali gallery in April. Diao likely “wanted or needed this kind of much more conventional apparatus,” said Sawon, who added that no other artists have left Postmasters due to its model changing.
The most challenging piece of the Postmasters 5.0 transition relates to the technical logistics of putting on a show in an unfamiliar space, from wiring a room to bringing the proper tools. “When there is a gallery, there’s always a basement with every possible screw that you may need,” said Sawon. “Here we are entering a new location each time, and there’s nothing there.”
Reactions from others in the art world have also been difficult for Sawon. “A lot of people think that by doing things differently, we are not doing things at all,” she said. “That’s spectacularly faulty and a fairly negative read of what we try to do.”
She isn’t sure where Postmasters will be ten years from now. “One can always return to convention,” she said. Given that the gallery has been operating for nearly 40 decades, Sawon doesn’t see it closing down or radically changing anytime soon, whether in physical or nomadic form.
“For me, it’s worth it to continue with this adventure as long as it allows you to not compromise.”
