Lucy Mithcell-Innes at Mitchell-Innes and Nash Gallery, in New York. Portrait by Steve Benisty.
Today the Art Dealer’s Association of Amercia’s (ADAA) Art Show opens to a private audience of VIPs and media at the Park Avenue Armory. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was at the historic location this morning to kick off the fair and Armory Arts Week. The Art Show will be open to the public from Wednesday, March 3 – Sunday, March 7. This year the fair has a new president, Lucy Mitchell-Innes. Whitewall interviewed Mitchell-Innes for its spring issue, out this week. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
WHITEWALL: This year you were voted the new president of the ADAA, and you’re also the first female president. How does that feel, and what sort of significance does that have for you given that the art world has been historically dominated by male figures?
LUCY MITCHELL-INNES: Well, I’m sort of surprised that you say that and that people have reacted in that way because many of the best painters have traditionally been and still are women, and that goes back a long time. So I beg to differ. It’s true to say that there have been no women who are presidents, but there were women on the founding board. So certainly there were lots of very important women, dealers, and gallerists.
WW: You’ve been a member of the ADAA for quite some time. How do you see your role as president of the ADAA? We interviewed the former president Roland Augustine in 2007, and he said he had taken on a more active role than past presidents.
LMI: I think that Roland has gotten a lot done in terms of standardizing the practices and building up many of the initiatives that I have inherited today, and I absolutely intend to continue those and develop them. I think that one of the things I would like is to develop closer relationships between the collecting base and the dealers through collectors’ forums, providing collectors access to the dealers, their minds, their knowledge. I want to continue our newsletter, and I hope we will be able to get that into a blog format eventually. We are also working on the appraisal side because, again, there’s an enormous amount of knowledge. But my main goal is to make the public more aware and use the ADAA and its members as resources, volunteering information for collecting.
WW: You’ve been on the selection committee for the Art Basel Miami Beach fair since it began. How does the selection process for that fair differ from that of the ADAA Art Fair?
LMI: It’s a completely different process. The ADAA is membership first. There’s a voting process, and then the committee meets and looks at the voting and makes a final selection depending on what we know about them, their programs, their track record — all of that. The committee has to do quite a lot of work, they have to have been around to the galleries, they have to know the program, they’re expected to be informed about this. In a lot of ways it’s the same also with Miami — you have to know a lot, but there is no voting system in Miami at all. The committee divides itself up and then evaluates.
WW: You mentioned ADAA’s appraisal service. Who should be utilizing that?
LMI: Collectors, people who want their whole collections appraised, for required appraisals, for estate taxes, for gifts to museums, exhibitions. My job is to showcase these tremendously talented individuals who are our members, who have a great eye, great judgment, great expertise in a huge number of fields.
