GASP gallery, which was founded by artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and her musician husband Neil Leonard in 2004, has closed its doors at 368 Boylston St. in Brookline, Massachusetts. Leonard tells The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research that they plan to reopen in a new space in the fall.
Campos-Pons, a teacher at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and one of the most prominent artists in the region, was the subject of a major traveling retrospective organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2007. GASP, short for Gallery Artists Studio Projects, has been a gallery and performance venue, as well as renting studios to artists. Though it has been less prominent of late, the gallery has been a major alternative venue for local emerging artists–particularly those coming out of the Museum School–as well as presenting sharp, small group shows featuring international art stars like Kerry James Marshall and Carrie Mae Weems, whom Campos-Pons has brought in through her own extensive art world network. Around 2008, the gallery expanded into the storefront next door, about doubling its gallery space. But for the past couple years finances have been tight, and not helped by the Great Recession.
“Whatever we don’t have [in Boston] we make,” Leonard told me when the gallery celebrated its fifth anniversary in 2009. “And GASP is one of the ways we do that.”
Previously:
Oct. 20, 2009: GASP marks five years.
Oct. 20, 2009: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons interview.