COURTESY CANADA
The Tribeca art district continues to blossom, with Canada gallery, a stalwart of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, planning to open up shop next spring at 60 Lispenard Street, just below Houston between Church and Lafayette.
Canada will join a bounty of galleries that have opened in Tribeca over the past few years—Postmasters, Queer Thoughts, Alexander & Bonin, and Bortolami among them—as well as others with plans to do so soon, including James Cohan and Andrew Kreps.
Canada has been located a short walk away from its future home, at 333 Broome, since 2012. That space is to be torn down to make way for a hotel, according to Phil Grauer, a co-founder of the gallery.
The gallery’s lease included a demolition clause, so the proprietors knew a need to move was a possibility. Consequently, they have embraced the news. “Sometimes being on the earlier end of everyone’s lease coming up, you are kind of at an advantage,” Grauer said. “This place in Tribeca was one of the few spaces that made sense” in terms of its proportions, size, and price.
The new location, first reported by Tribeca Citizen, will be about the same size as Canada’s current home, and will similarly offer the potential of having two shows at once. (Los Angeles’s Regen Projects had earlier this year been considering a move into the same location but pulled out.)
The area around Canada has also presented some challenges, Grauer said. “There’s so much demolition and construction between the condos and the hotels, it’s gotten noisy and hard to deliver crates.” (As some gallery goers may also be aware, the city has also been storing masses of construction materials outside the gallery for quite some time.)
The new Tribeca abode will require a buildout, and the plan at the moment is for Canada to decamp from Broome Street at the end of January to open on Lispenard—a fairly quiet street that was once home to the first Printed Matter bookstore and is currently home to Nancy Whiskey Pub—sometime in early spring.
“It’s kind of a sabbatical,” said Grauer, noting that the gap in programming would provide an opportunity for the team to think through the gallery, which represents artists like Xylor Jane, Katherine Bernhardt, and Michael Mahalchick. “It wouldn’t be great if it went on forever, but a little break’s not bad.”
And as similar as the new home may be to its current space, it does have one distinct advantages: it’s registered as a historic building. “There won’t be a demolition,” Grauer said, “because the building is protected.”