From the Globe:
Camilo Alvarez’s Samson Projects gallery and Colin Rhys’s buzzed-about Rhys Gallery, both on Harrison Avenue, are active players on the art-fair circuit. Alvarez says that he went to six or seven fairs this season, and that of his approximately 40 regular clients, only two are Boston collectors. Rhys, who recently had a successful trip to the Scope Basel fair in Switzerland, no longer believes Boston is a good city from which to run a bricks-and-mortar gallery. In Basel, he says, “We sold things we never would have sold here. It just doesn’t happen here.”
Rhys closed his Rhys Gallery on Thursday and plans to open a new gallery outside Sao Paolo, Brazil, in August, with another one in Los Angeles next March. “In Los Angeles, you have collectors flying in to look at the art scene there,” he says. “That doesn’t happen in Boston.”
That’s a shame. The Rhys Gallery had a prominent location at the corner of East Berkeley Street and Harrison Avenue.
Is Boston different from other cities? Can it just not sustain galleries, because there’s just too few people who care?
Redrawing the map of Hub galleries; New economic scene brings moves, closings – By Cate McQuaid, The Boston Globe
