Hannah Traore Launches New York Gallery Focusing On ‘Artists Who Have Been Left Out Of The Conversation’

When Hannah Traore was working on her undergraduate honors thesis in art history at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, she began exploring the work of Malick Sidibé, whose legendary studio portraits and street photography featured everyday people in Mali, where her father is from.

Skidmore has a renowned university art museum, the Tang Teaching Museum, and in 2017, Traore organized an exhibition there titled “Africa Pop Studio” that included Sidibé’s work and that of various artists he had influenced, including Derrick Adams, Zanele Muholi, Aida Muluneh, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, and Hassan Hajjaj, who collaborated with Traore on the exhibition’s colorful installation.

“From then on, I knew I wanted to open a gallery because I realized I wanted to go down the curatorial route,” Traore said in an interview. “But you can’t always realize your true vision in someone else’s space: one, they won’t let you, and two, you want to keep that close to you. I realized early on I would have to do it in my own space.”

That goal is now a reality, as Traore has launched her own gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, in a move spurred on by reflecting on her career amid the pandemic. Traore, who was been a curatorial intern at the Museum of Modern Art and worked at Fotografiska New York, looked for spaces in the Lower East Side because she was drawn to the possibility of the foot traffic her gallery might attract outside of the art world.

The gallery’s first show, which opened on Thursday, is titled “Hues” and features the work of artists of color who foreground bold tones in their work, such as Wendy Red Star, Patricia Renee’ Thomas, Muzae Sesay, Camila Falquez, and Jeffrey Cheung.

Alongside the main area where “Hues” is on view is a backroom “for different kinds of exhibitions where artists can play more and for more immersive experiences—larger-than-life installations,” Traore said. Inaugurating it is “Mi Casa Su Casa,” a group show organized by Hajjaj that features his work alongside that of 14 emerging artists from Morocco, arranged salon-style.

When she worked on the exhibition at Skidmore, Traore wanted the exhibition’s installation to “feel like an African portrait studio,” so she reached out to Hajjaj to see if he would be interested in collaborating. Hajjaj agreed, and he designed an installation with bright red and yellow walls, chandeliers made from recycled materials, and poufs for sitting. The two met at that exhibition’s closing reception and have stayed in contact over the years.

Her primary focus will be on presenting the work of “artists who have traditionally been left out of the conversation—and when they’ve been brought into the conversation, it’s often been in a performative way,” she said. “I think the dynamic changes a lot when the person giving the platform is in multiple underrepresented groups as well.