Last fall I spent a long weekend in Abilene, Texas to see Witness: Black Artists in Texas, Then and Now at the Grace Museum and to meet with artists at the Center for Contemporary Arts. As with all good trips, other surprises snuck into the planned agenda. While grabbing pizza with Judy Deaton, Director of Exhibitions and Collections and Chief Curator at the Grace, we ran into local gallerist and art dealer Jody Klotz, whose space was just a few doors down. Deaton introduced us and insisted that I should stop by Klotz’s space if I had the time.
I didn’t know much about Jody Klotz, but I was curious about how a gallery might function in a small town like Abilene. Klotz’s space is an unassuming storefront in the historic downtown. When I met her at the location she provided, a door down from the gallery she greeted me and invited me into her home. The entryway was filled with plants, cats, and a parrot. I felt I had been transported into a different time and place.
Quickly and easily Klotz and I chatted as if we were old friends as she showed me around her surprising residence, an open space with tall ceilings and lofts for her bedroom and office area. We walked through to the kitchen and out the back door, up some stairs to a rooftop garden and woodshop where her partner custom builds beautiful frames for her gallery. It was magical and far from what I could have imagined.
The tour continued through the back of the gallery, which is in the adjacent building. She spoke of her work as an art dealer and about a show she was building that would center an AbEx woman artist who, like many women, was underrecognized in her time. Our in-person meeting was a fantastical blur and I knew that I had to learn more about her.
Months later, Klotz and I spoke on the phone for a more official interview, which extended to two conversations totaling about 3 hours. Below are excerpts from our chat that have been edited for readability.
Jessica Fuentes (JF): How did you get your start as an art dealer?
Jody Klotz (JK): I bought my first painting when I was 20 years old, just out of college. I grew up 20 minutes outside of New York City and was a very urban/suburban kid, because I worked throughout my childhood at the Metropolitan Opera House as an acrobatic dancer, from the time I was 11 years old to my early 20s. I was an acrobatic soloist in an opera called Pagliacci when I was 11. I did that role for four years and was in lots of other operas doing stunt work, and all the little and big acting parts in the operas. I went to college as a drama major, because I thought I’d go into the theater, but I ended up becoming an art history major because I just loved art.
I was going to museums in New York City a lot the summer after my first year of college and just loved looking at paintings. So, I took an art history course and really liked it. I switched my major to art history but never thought I would do anything with it, I just thought it would be a good all-around education.
In my senior year of college, I did an internship at Christie’s. I went to college in Long Island, and the art history program had a specialization in art appraisal. As part of the program, I had to write a thesis and do an internship at a major auction house or gallery in New York City.
Even before that though, my father used to take us to auctions when I was a little girl in Greenwich Village; that was really the beginning for me. My father loved beautiful things, so we would go to the Sunday auctions in Greenwich Village and my dad would buy paintings and a variety of things like tapestries, jewelry, and little sculptures.
It all sort of weaves together in the story of a life — you don’t realize it until later with hindsight. My mother was a big influence on me also. She loved languages and culture and we went to Europe when I was little girl a couple of times and they took me around to museums. I ended up loving languages, I speak French and Italian. All of that roots what I do.
JF: That’s all quite incredible. Tell me more about your experience at college, the internship, and that first painting you purchased.
JK: I went to college when I was 16, so I was 19 in my senior year. The art world was a very different place. It was a really interesting experience working at Christie’s in their Old Master paintings department that semester, and then when I graduated, they kept me on as a paid intern. Altogether, I worked there for about 10 months. When I was a paid intern, they had me in the warehouse pulling the paintings off the racks and labeling the backs of the paintings. I got a tremendous amount of exposure in that little time.
A guy I went to college with was a young hustling art dealer, and I was like, “What is an art dealer?” He took me around to galleries and I watched him operate, and I was utterly intrigued. One day I was with him at a gallery and he bought a painting. It was an old master painting that he bought from a prominent American painting dealer. We looked at the painting, and I watched him haggle about the price. Then I watched him buy it. As we were walking out the door, he looked at me and said, “You want to be my partner?”
It was a $12,000 painting, and I had $5,800, from my life savings working at the Met Opera all those years and three jobs that summer. I was 20 years old and I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I looked at him and said, “Sure.”
That was the beginning of my career as an art dealer. Two months later I told my father what I had done. When I said I had spent all this money on the painting, he paused for a minute and looked at me and said, “Are you crazy?” I saw this little glimmer in his eye, because my dad had a little bit of a gambling spirit. I think he kind of saw himself in me. Three months after buying that painting for $12,000, this friend sold it for $32,000 to one of the most prominent Old Master painting dealers, a London gallery called Colnaghi. I made $10,000 and, like a horse with blinders on, I started to study the art market.
JF: How did you go about studying the art market at the time?
JK: I’m 64 years old, so this was in the early 1980s. There was no internet, there was no way to go find art price databases and compare to become a self-made expert in five minutes, like everybody does today. There were a couple of big thick books that had just the names of artists and the paintings that had sold and the sizes and the prices and no images. You had to really look at art extensively to understand the market. It was a very different learning process. Fast forward to two years later: I moved to Paris, where I lived for four years as a young fledgling art dealer.
It was life-informing for me. I lived five blocks away from Hotel Drouot, which was where all of the art auctions took place. It had four floors and a labyrinth of rooms, and 80-something auction houses held their auctions there. You could go any day and see the exhibitions of what was going on and the next day the auction would be held. There was everything in there: furniture, art, jewelry, all different kinds of auctions.
I used to go to the Old Master auctions and I would spend the entire day in front of the paintings. I would go from painting to painting and stand in front of them and ask myself a handful of questions: What nationality is it? What half-century was it from? Who’s the artist? What’s the estimate? 90% of the time I was wrong, because when you major in art history in college you learn about half a dozen representative artists of a period. What I found fascinating was that there were hundreds and thousands of artists that I had never heard of before.
There are an awful lot of things that I don’t know how to do in today’s day and age, but I can stand in the middle of a room with art from the 17th century to the 19th century and identify the work. My eye is really sharp now because I’ve spent a lifetime looking at art.
JF: When did you come back to the U.S.?
JK: I moved back to New York when I was 26. My father was ill, so I wanted to be home. I lived in New York for the next 12 years and worked as a private art dealer. I had an apartment on the Upper East Side, which at that time was the center of the art world. I traveled to Europe probably three or four times a year for anywhere between 10 days and three weeks at a time. I gradually built my business of buying and selling art in a very international way.
JF: It’s hard to imagine living this type of life — being in New York, spending time traveling overseas — and then deciding to settle down in Abilene, Texas. What brought you here?
JK: When I was 37, I met a guy on a Christmas ski vacation in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. My sister, who lives in San Francisco, and I would meet there every Christmas. I met this handsome young man, who I very capriciously married five weeks later. I moved from the Upper East Side of New York to Abilene.
JF: What were your impressions of Texas before you decided to uproot and move here?
JK: Ironically, prior to meeting this guy, I had been dating a really lovely guy from Houston. He was in finance and was in Europe and then Chicago and we had a long-distance relationship. He wanted to move to Austin and I told him that there was no way in a million years I was going to move to Texas. I had been to Texas once or twice for auctions, but I could not see myself moving there. Ironically, the man that I married was a geologist in the oil business and it would have been much more challenging for him to do his work in New York than for me to do mine in Texas. So, I moved here and I kept someone working for me full-time in New York for a year and a half.
JF: What was the transition like for your business?
JK: I was worried about the transition and if I was going to be able to keep things going, but I never stopped working. About a year and a half later, when I felt like I could manage, I let go of that apartment and the staff member who worked full time for me in New York. But for many years, I continued to travel to Europe and New York regularly, and also exhibited in some prestigious art fairs in Palm Beach, Dallas and Beverly Hills in the early years after I moved to Texas.
JF: What was Abilene like when you first arrived?
JK: I moved here in 1997 and took a prop plane from Dallas to Abilene. I had to get off the plane on the tarmac and walk to the terminal. I remember driving through downtown Abilene and feeling like I was on Mars. It was so foreign to me and I still, in some ways, feel like a foreigner in a foreign land.
But, back in the 90s, my then-husband had bought an old building right smack in the heart of downtown. At the time, downtown was dead as a doornail, nothing like it is now. There are some wonderful restaurants and local shops downtown, there’s some vibrancy here now. But, when I moved here, I would walk out that front door at night and I could hear the red light switch, downtown was a ghost town.
I think if I would have gotten here earlier in my life I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. But, at that point, having done all that kind of globetrotting, this was kind of like a new experience. It was new and interesting to be deep in America, in Texas. It helped that I married into a family that was both very colorful and really embraced me. It made it all very easy.
Living in New York, as a single woman, everything’s hard unless you’re wealthy. Going to the supermarket, getting a doctor’s appointment, parking your car, everything is hard. I remember when I first moved here, the first couple of years felt like I was on a magic carpet… going to the grocery store, driving, everything was just so easy and gentle. The people are kind and warm-hearted. At 40 years old I started taking horseback riding lessons. For five years, I loved going out and learning to ride horses.
There are a lot of charms about this kind of a life and in the many years that I’ve been here, it has all evolved tremendously and changed… There are chapters of my life here.
When I moved here, the people who knew me from New York and Paris, could not fathom what the hell I was doing. It was so incongruous and a lot of it still is. I’ve just sort of built on it, I keep evolving here.
JF: How did being in Abilene affect your business? What happened after you let your New York staff person go and how did that shift affect the work that you do?
JK: My ability to operate from here is based on the fact that I had been an art dealer for 17 years in New York and Paris before I moved here, and I had a lot of knowledge, a lot of know-how, and relationships. I just continued to do what I do, from here, the best I could. All my life I’ve never worked for anybody. All my life as a dealer, I’ve bought and sold paintings. I’m like a little fox — I’m figuring out where something good is, looking around at all the auctions and trying to find a good painting to buy. I just kept doing that for years.
I’d still go to Paris and New York regularly, and it was definitely challenging, and honestly, it was like a magic trick. I don’t even know how I did it from where I was, but I did. Back then there was only the phone and the fax — I’d ship paintings from Paris to Texas instead of Paris to New York. In the beginning, it was quite hard because I was trying to build an infrastructure. Now I have a staff of three talented people, but for a while, I just had an assistant who didn’t really know anything about the art business. So it’s been challenging through the years.
A few years after moving to Abilene, I did some very high profile art fairs, the Palm Beach International Art and Antiques Fair, and the same fair in Dallas and Beverly Hills. That created some good exposure and new clientele for me. I was figuring out ways to have visibility outside of Abilene and develop business. Remember this is before the age of great exposure from the Internet, which has been a game changer.
I was originally working out of my downtown house, and a few years after I moved here, the building next door became available. It was a rundown building and we had a right of first refusal on it. I decided to buy it; it would be an opportunity to break from the house into this gallery, or extend the house, or something. It wasn’t very expensive. The building was a wreck and I had a renter in there that would pay for the mortgage, more or less. Then six months later, the renter decided to move. I had this building and decided to renovate it and turn it into a gallery.
JF: What was the reception to the gallery opening? How did the local community respond?
JK: During the course of the gallery renovation, which took about nine months to complete, the then-acting director at the Grace Museum approached me about curating an exhibition on French art from 1850 to 1950. They wanted me to curate a show, and I’m not a curator. Ultimately, my mother-in-law, who I adored, and the director, and then the new director of the museum really pressured me like only they can in a small town, and I took on this big labor of love of putting on a major show.
I had no experience doing it and I did it pro bono. I managed to get 50 works, I leaned into all of the relationships that I had, I cold-called museums all over the country… and I got loans from the Menil Collection, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum in California, the Dahesh Museum of Art in New York, and about 12 different institutions, and then private clients that I had, or dealers. I flew in a Picasso from Switzerland, on loan. I’m not a scholar or an art historian, but I did my best to create an exhibition that would give a sweeping view of as many styles of art from that period of French art so that people would have a sweeping impression of the evolution of the period.
It was a big deal for the institution. The museum raised $100,000 (this was in 2000) to sponsor this show. It was a huge undertaking. I had to speak publicly for them, I wrote all the wall labels, it was a huge job. What did I know about curating a museum exhibition? But, I did it, and on the heels of that show, they got their museum accreditation and I contributed something culturally here.
I opened my gallery at the same time as that exhibition. I hosted a big fancy party, which had a lot of 19th-century paintings, and there was something really wonderful about being able to make a difference. I contributed something to this community that made a difference, because in a small city like this, they take great pride in whatever is theirs. The people here really loved it.
JF: After that opening, how did the gallery shift and change over the years?
JK: For many years, the gallery was open to the public and had very appreciated events. Contributing to the local cultural community was gratifying to me. In a small city one person can make a difference and that is wonderful and very different from New York or Paris! Abilene is a small city with a lot of civic pride and relatively speaking, a good deal of culture.
I was all the while really needing to support myself with other national and international art dealing business though and continue to do so with regular business in New York and Paris. But, over the years, some local families started to patronize the gallery and the local business activity was terrific. It has taken a lot of determination from me to get traction here. I’ve developed relationships with clients and some amazing interior designers in Texas, and love and continue to develop the local and regional business. I have clients now all around the state and am also selling art nationally, in Europe and occasionally in Asia. All from little Abilene. It’s been an uphill struggle but in some ways being here has been an advantage as well. Through the years my mantra has been “If you build it they will come” from Field of Dreams. It’s taken a while, but they really are coming. People have flown in to see works in the gallery from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and even Mexico City; and when that happens it’s really exciting.
There have been different and challenging chapters of my life and the life of the gallery. For some periods the gallery was open by appointment only because I was traveling too much for personal reasons. But, about 15 years ago, I decided to hunker down and focus on trying to ramp up the gallery activity with more exhibitions and events.
So I worked, and continue to work, to raise the gallery’s visibility and exhibited things that resonated with the local and regional clientele doing some Texas-centric shows that were approachable for the people here. I did a show on Texas landscapes which people loved and it got them in the doors. Next thing I knew, someone who bought a Texas landscape was then buying a French 19th century landscape, and then bought an abstract postwar work in later years as the gallery exhibitions evolved stylistically. So I slowly broadened people’s horizons over time. When a local would buy a $1,500 work of art, it was just as exciting to me as selling a $150,000 painting.
Over the years, I’ve continued to have exhibitions that focus on Texas artist’s and worked to engage the community through programming. For example, when I showed work by Janet Turner and Kelly Fearing, I had my good friend (and famous actor) Peter Coyote come and give a gallery talk on that show and how it related to Zen Buddhism, which was very well received.
I’ve done some art fairs, I did the Houston HADA (Houston Antique Dealers Association) Antique Fair twice, but as the years have gone on, the ambitiousness of my shows has grown quite a lot. I’ve also sprinkled in working with contemporary artists, like the Colette Copeland show I did a couple of years ago. In the last couple of years we have had big gallery concerts to complement the art exhibitions organized by my gallery director Joshua Wright, who is an extremely talented professional musician. They may have been my favorite events!
I’m always just kind of trying to reinvent myself, reinvent this gallery, and figure out what’s next. What I love is being a resource. I have over 500 paintings in inventory right now. Some of it is important and some of it is very minor, but I have a lot of art.
JF: Have you continued to stay engaged with the Grace Museum?
JK: Judy Deaton at the Grace Museum is so wonderful and so talented and has done so much to create a definition and importance for the museum. Through the years, we have been supportive of each other. I had started to buy Texas Modernism, which really aesthetically appealed to me, and I participated in CASETA [the Center for the Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art] two years in a row. I was trying to get more rooted in this regionally.
One day, Judy and I were talking and I had all these Texas Modernist paintings and she was going to do a Texas Modernism show and a Seymour Fogel show at the Grace Museum, and I was like “Well, why don’t I do a show in my gallery of Texas, American, and European Modernism to contextualize the Texas artists in a broader arena?” We thought that was a great idea, and I made it happen. I hired Judy to write the essay for the catalog, about the universality of the language of abstraction. The show put Texas modernists next to an Alexander Calder, next to a Jacques Villon. Some of those artists were in Texas for 10 years, but they came from New York or they went to Chicago and studied at the Art Institute. Some of them went to Europe; these artists merited being put into a broader picture.
Over the years, Judy and I have worked together in a variety of ways, always seeking to produce some cultural synergy between our organizations. During an exhibition I had of Texas regionalist artist, Randy Bacon, she and the artist had a gallery talk.
JF: So, what has been your most recent fixation? What are you interested in and working on?
JK: Last year my show focused on female AbEx and Color Field artists. In 2021, I did a show in the gallery on Lynne Mapp Drexler, a postwar artist. On the heels of my show, her market took off astronomically with a global interest. She became a blue-chip artist with paintings selling over $1 million. I had people come to the gallery and buy works from all over the world: New York, Mexico City, Amsterdam, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. I have used the success of that show and the attention it brought to my gallery as a springboard to cultivate a passion for female AbEx and Color Field artists. It’s continued a new and exciting direction and trajectory for the gallery activity and inventory.
In recent years I have participated in high-profile art fairs in Palm Springs and most recently at Art Miami, which was an exciting and important fair with lots of exposure. My hope is to manage to get into the Dallas Art Fair, as I would love for more collectors here in Texas to know about my gallery.
I started as a dealer dealing mostly in 19th-century European and American paintings, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, and some Modern, but never contemporary. In the most recent years, the sweep of change has been pretty dramatic, where those types of paintings have a much thinner market. When I was in my 40s, there were a lot of collectors of 19th-century paintings, and there still are some, but so much less. Tastes have changed, there are new generations, and there are different interests in the marketplace. I’ve changed both by necessity, following the market by some degree because this is how I make my living, and by interest. Tastes evolve and it has been exciting to delve into other areas. The main thrust of my inventory has really changed.
And, going back to working with contemporary artists, I’ve committed to doing a show with Dallas artist Carmen Menza next year. I met her at Kips Bay — she had done her wonderful light boxes there and I had curated the art for the room of a fabulous Austin interior designer Mark Cravotta. I’ve been afraid to engage with contemporary artists too much because I’m afraid I’ll disappoint them. It’s a lot harder when you have the expectation of someone who’s alive. But, I think Carmen’s show will be great fun. She is so creative and the things she does are mesmerizing, hypnotic, and beautiful.
JF: Currently you have an exhibition on view that features Alice Baber. And I think when we visited last fall, you mentioned there was a book about to be published related to the artist?
JK: Yes — This is unquestionably the most ambitious show I have put on. Alice Baber is another phenomenal, and until recently overlooked postwar female artist, who caught my eye a couple of years ago. I started to buy her work with the hopes of putting on an exhibition and resurrecting her legacy. There is so much interest in this artist that I am planning to travel this major exhibition in the fall to a big city, to be announced soon, as her market interest is very significant with a painting selling last year at auction for almost $700,000. Dr. Gail Levin, who was the first curator of the Hopper Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and who also specializes in Abstract Expressionism and women artists, wrote the essay for my gallery catalog and has written a biography on Baber to be published soon. It’s incredibly exciting. Gail has written biographies of Lee Krasner, Judy Chicago, and Edward Hopper. She also has written about Paul Jenkins, who Alice Baber spent 10 years with, four of them married and the rest of them as a couple. They traveled together, they exhibited together, and they shared the same dealer in some cases, but she has been pretty much erased from the history of Jenkins. Gail has done groundbreaking research both for my 116 page exhibition catalog and the biography.
JF: I want to circle back around to Abilene. We talked about how you got here, but now, why do you stay?
JK: It’s a good question. I’ve asked myself that from time to time and I have always felt a little like a foreigner here, but I have roots. I have a gallery, a house, and a whole bunch of animals. I’m able to operate from here in a very comfortable way. The idea of picking up and moving somewhere else really feels pretty daunting. I like my life here and I’m comfortable.
There is some level of frustration, of not having more… If I had this show of Alice Baber in New York, it would be getting a whole lot of attention, and it is getting some attention, but I’m always pushing… Everything is an uphill struggle. I probably have to try five times harder to accomplish what I might accomplish in a bigger city with a lot more ease, but I have such a nice life here.
I’m kind of looking from the sidelines a little bit, operating on the periphery, and I like that on some level, not being in the middle of the sharks. I don’t know if I would have stayed in New York if I would have survived. In some ways, being here through the years has really served me, because people might perceive me as not being so sophisticated or plugged in, and then meanwhile, I’m really quite plugged in. And, certainly, I don’t have New York City rent. I would never have been able to develop as a gallery like this when I was younger in New York. I was able to create something here that I couldn’t have created elsewhere, and I was able to be relevant in a way I wouldn’t have been able to be elsewhere.
All through these years that I’ve been here, there have been several chapters of my personal life, and everybody just expected me to leave, but I never did. I just kept building on the good.
Recent Comments