Sue Scott in the Lower East Stew

I moved to New York about 20 years ago and made my way writing for various art magazines and curating independently—a lot of which was out in the hinterlands, but featured New York artists. I also worked as an adjunct curator for the Orlando Museum of Art.

It was an interesting time to curate, less complicated than it is now. For instance, I was contracted to curate a show about the automobile in art, which may sound corny, but I was able to borrow works by Ernest Trova from the Whitney and an early David Salle from the National Museum of American Art. Sal Scarpitta actually drove his truck to the museum where the show was and installed his signature race car with potatoes, an installation I had seen at Castelli earlier that year. I do not think something like that could happen so easily now. I liked working with artists that were maybe a little out of fashion at the moment.

I opened a gallery almost by default; I was publishing monotypes with my company, One Eye Pug, and showed the monotypes at a small place in Chelsea that I shared. My friend Suzanne McClelland kept telling me about the Lower East Side, and galleries like CANADA and Salon 94 / Freeman’s Alley—and of course, The New Museum—that had opened in the area. My husband and I wandered around for weeks, until our crazy realtor found a place on the corner of Rivington and Bowery. It was a little bigger than I had been looking for and somehow the idea morphed from a place to exhibit monotypes to fully functioning gallery.

I like the scale of my gallery; it is ideal for experiencing art on an intimate basis—it is not overwhelming. I hear repeatedly about how artists are daunted by the cavernous spaces of their Chelsea galleries, that they like the human scale of the LES galleries. But it’s deceptive too, because we can accommodate quite a bit of art. For instance, when we did our works on paper show last year, we went wild and had 80 artists with over 100 works.

The LES is a special place, it’s very much like what Richard Price talked about in his book “Lush Life”—illustrated by the exhibition of the same name, curated by Franklin Evans and Omar Lopez-Chahoud—and shown at nine galleries in the Lower East Side. The high and low, the fancy and derelict, the rich and the poor, co-exist in one, slightly cramped stew. I’ve been told that over the years my gallery space has been a stable, a flop-house, a store called “Buy and Sell,” and a yoga shala. It is now an architected gallery space inside but you wouldn’t know it from the way that it looks on the outside; that is the dichotomy of the LES.

I don’t think the art world is just about the now; it’s a continuum. I am most interested in showing work and artists that are connected to that continuum, whether they are extending or rejecting it. I like the fact that recently, Tom McGrath, a young painter, has his show inside the gallery. And that simultaneously, the venerable Pat Steir reprised her graffiti waterfalls on the outside wall of my building.

The Lower East Side is the breeding ground for a new generation of New York artists; it is a place where artists feel freer to experiment and develop. The shows happening in the LES are fresh, exciting and it’s encouraging that critics, both established and independent, think so too.