DEBORAH FRITZ
AND HER GALLERY EMPIRE
DEBORAH FRITZ sat down at the small café table at Sky Coffee in the Railyard, an iced poppyseed muffin and pistachio-lemon donut between us. In the background, The Byrds were crooning.
Gate won’t close Railings froze Get your mind off wintertime You ain’t goin’ nowhere
The coffee shop is near Fritz’s latest venture, a gallery space on Guadalupe Street within spitting distance of Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Blue Rain Gallery, Tai Modern, and SITE Santa Fe. She’s in good company, and the art space, Gallery Fritz, is about to celebrate its first anniversary in March. The owner of three successful galleries in town, Fritz is cautiously optimistic: The Railyard has seen its fair share of contemporary arts spaces open and close or relocate in recent years, including former mainstays David Richard Gallery and James Kelly Contemporary. Gallery Fritz is in a space formerly occupied by William Siegal Gallery, which moved to a smaller space in town.
“It’s like an experiment that I’m doing,” she said. “Business isn’t as good down in the Railyard. People ask me if it’s because of the artwork that I’m featuring. Well, no. Because Canyon Road has some of the same artists and they sell so much better on Canyon Road. We can try things that are a little edgy at Gallery Fritz but, possibly, aren’t focused on the bottom line as much. Although — don’t get me wrong — I’m a business person, and I want to have a successful gallery and I want my artists to make a living.”
The Railyard galleries, on the whole, are focused more on contemporary works than traditional fine arts, such as the figurative bronze sculptures and landscape paintings that seem ubiquitous on Canyon Road. “You’d expect the Railyard to be the hub of where your client base is,” she said. “It’s not. But it will be, and that’s why I’m here. I want to lend my talents to possibly shaking it up a little bit.”
That’s Fritz, a New Mexican born and raised. Throughout her life, she’s recognized that problems can be opportunities and that the ability to change course is often a necessity if you want to be the best at whatever drives you. Since 2001, when she opened her first gallery on Canyon Road (with sister Kimberly Giacobbe), it’s been selling art.
“It was always my intention to have a more commercial gallery,” said Fritz, who is in her forties. “That’s Giacobbe-Fritz. I’ve been on Canyon Road for more of my life than I haven’t been.”
Fritz is an art aficionado with an eclectic range of interests and tastes. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, each of the three galleries has a different focus. Giacobbe-Fritz is more accessible with more representational work, she said, adding that some of the work there tends toward the whimsical. GF Contemporary is a modern and contemporary art space. And Gallery Fritz, she described as a white box, New York-style gallery that features more cutting-edge art.
Fritz credits her ability to survive in a difficult market to her diverse stable of 70 artists. “Somebody asked me recently for the statistics on how many male artists I represent and how many female artists I represent. It was almost dead even — like, 34 female, 36 male.”
Unlike a lot of other dealers in town, Fritz didn’t come to Santa Fe with money to burn. She was born in Los Alamos, the daughter of a physicist who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratories.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but Los Alamos was a great place to grow up,” she said. “Everybody knew everybody, but you didn’t really know what anybody did. I was watching the TV series ‘Stranger Things’ with somebody recently, and he was like, ‘It’s so funny that this little town would be right outside this big laboratory that’s doing all these experiments’ and I’m like, ‘Hmm, that’s my childhood.’ Because we didn’t know. ‘What does your dad do?’ ‘He works at the Lab.’ You didn’t say he was a physicist. It was before the Berlin Wall fell. It was a real secret city.”
Consequently, when a high school assignment to produce a topographical map of the town posed a problem for Fritz, she had to do Santa Fe because Los Alamos wasn’t on the map.
When she was still in high school, trips abroad to other cities awakened her love of art. She recalled seeing John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the impression the large-scale oil painting had on her. “I’m getting goose bumps just thinking about it,” she said. “I remember looking at the brushwork and the size of it — because it’s big — and reading about how, when he painted it, the girls were interacting in such a way that he really wanted to put their personalities into the painting. Art has so much power. I remember going to a Rodin exhibit and wanting to touch the art and you can’t as a viewer. But you can as a dealer.” She moved to Santa Fe in 1997, after graduating with a degree in fine art from the University of New Mexico. Her intention was to make a living as an artist. In college, her work was centered on food-based installation art, but many collectors avoid installation art because of the space required to mount it. At UNM, she supported herself by working as a cake decorator. She then became the director of the Downey Gallery on Canyon Road, a position she held for four years until she co-founded Giacobbe-Fritz. Her favorite part of the job, she said, is connecting collectors with artists. That’s because the collectors she represents are looking at art less as investments than as objects to cherish and live with, and they generally want to establish long-lasting relationships with the people that make them. You could say that she has her finger on a pulse, recognizing that there is, indeed, a market for contemporary art in Santa Fe. Even edgier work has a place here, she said.
“Art can be a projection,” she said, citing the work of collaborators Bruce Hamilton and Susanna Carlisle, who work in new media. “Or it can be a glob of clay that hangs up on the wall. I really want to highlight that.”
Fritz also wants the Railyard gallery to remain a dynamic space where she isn’t just showing new works by her represented artists, but opening the door to guest-curated shows like last summer’s group exhibition, The Presence of Absence, which was organized by independent local curator Ylise Kessler. Fritz recently collaborated with the Las Vegas, New Mexico-based gallery Mayeur Projects for an exhibit of work by their artists-in-residence, Alejandra Hernández and Frank Perrin.
She also plans to host a juried exhibition sponsored by the Española Valley Fiber Arts Center in May.
Fritz is committed to seeing Gallery Fritz become established to the point where it can hold its own like the other two galleries, which, to quote The Byrds, “ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
In the meantime, she can touch all the art she wants. “I still haven’t touched a Rodin,” she said, “but maybe someday.”