This week was a week of lasts at Gallery Kayafas in Boston. “Sitting here stuffing envelopes for the LAST exhibits,” owner Arlette Kayafas posted to social media a few days ago. “Last screw for the last frame of the last exhibit,” she subsequently posted about the installation of her gallery’s final shows, which run from June 28 to Aug. 10.
This August, Kayafas plans to close the gallery that she has run on Boston’s Harrison Avenue for 21 years. It began with a specialty in photography and expanded to showcase all types of art made around Boston. “Time goes so quickly. I can’t believe it’s been 21 years,” Kayafas tells me.
Kayafas launched the gallery in 2003 at unit 223 inside the second floor of the studios and galleries and shopping building at 450 Harrison Ave. “First Friday: curators came, museum directors came, collectors came. It was a pretty gritty place to visit,” Kayafas recalls.
She began the gallery after “I had been managing the care of elderly women for 13 years.”
When pioneering stop-motion photographer and family friend Harold Edgerton died in 1990, Kayafas helped his widow Esther manage the distribution of his library and became an assistant to her. This led Kayafas to helping other older women manage their affairs, often serving as a liaison between the women and their adult children. Kayafas says she had about 10 of these clients over 13 years, until “I decided I didn’t want to keep burying my grandmother.”
When Esther Edgerton died in 2002, her attorney informed Kayafas: “Esther left you money specifically to start a business or go back to school. It wasn’t much money. But it made me feel like it was what I was supposed to do.”
So she began Gallery Kayafas. Her husband, Gus, operates Palm Press in Medford and has been a longtime printer for prominent local photographers—Harold Edgerton, Minor White, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan. The couple were part of this circle of artists and their students. And at the beginning Kayafas’s gallery focused on photography.
Over time Gallery Kayafas moved to the garden level at 450 Harrison Ave., then upstairs to her current space, which was about twice as big. In 2012, Kayafas began also exhibiting contemporary paintings, installation, works on paper, sculpture, and video. “It’s such a positive place even when we have hard things to talk about,” Kayafas says.
Her older son is an artist, so Kayafas says she knew how difficult it could be for artists starting out to get shows. She ended up featuring mainly Boston-area artists—Jules Aarons, Kathleen Bitetti, Ria Brodell, Jesse Burke, Laura Chasman, Caleb Cole, Mark Cooper, Rebecca Doughty, Harold Edgerton, Yorgos Efthymiadis, Laura Evans, Kristen Joy Emack, Pat Falco, Matthew Gamber, Jonathan Gitelson, Audrey Goldstein, Judy Haberl, Mags Harries, Charles “Teenie” Harris, Harvey Loves Harvey, Joe Johnson, Steve Locke, A.B. Miner, Robert Moeller, Karen Moss, Bruce Myren, Zoe Perry-Wood, Ellen Rich, Alica Rodriguez Alvisa, Joe Sandman Tara Sellios, Leslie Sills, Aaron Siskind, Triiibe, August Ventimiglia, Tabitha Vevers, Clara Wainwright, Joseph Wheelwright and so on.
Last November, Kayafas says, her lease was up and rather than sign a new three-year commitment, she began renting month-to-month with a plan to close in August.
“I didn’t have sales for two years with covid, except for one small one to the MFA,” Kayafas says. “Our rents were raised considerably with a three-year lease and right now the [art] market is flat. … I just turned 77. I love what I do, but it cannot cover the high rent.”
Over the years, Gallery Kayafas has showcased many memorable artists and exhibitions. Here are just a couple….
In 2016, Kayafas exhibited Steve Locke’s “Family Pictures,” an exhibition reproducing historic photos of Black women serving as nannies and wet-nurses to white children as well as many photos documenting lynchings of Black men, often surrounded by happy white crowds. The photos were featured in contemporary store-bought frames reading “Memories,” “Family,” “Good times / good friends,” and the like. (It was partnered with a companion exhibition “The School of Love” at Samson.) Visitors “were so quiet. You could hear a pin drop,” Kayafas remembers. The exhibition included a reading room. “The purpose of the reading room was to talk to someone you didn’t know about race,” Kayafas says. Often that meant a conversation between her and gallery visitors. “The day after he [Trump] was elected nobody whispered anymore.”
And one more: Showing Caleb Cole’s photos, colleges and assemblages about “the opportunities and difficulties of queer belonging” (according to their website), Kayafas says, “I learned so much. It wasn’t that I wasn’t empathetic. … I had never really talked to someone about being frightened you would be murdered because of who you are. … Everybody has a right to live. It’s just not fair.”
Kayafas says, “You have to show people that people are not all the same. Differences are exciting. What is fragmenting is not experiencing differences. … There are these prejudices that come up just through ignorance.”
“I used the gallery as my bully pulpit for social injustice and gender intolerance, racial intolerance,” Kayafas says. “…My gallery is very political. … When we lost Roe, I had a 10-day pop-up for Planned Parenthood,” which raised $7,000. “It was a rude awakening for young people that we still have this fight going on. That’s one of the things I’ll miss most: not having a voice.”
Kayafas says, “I don’t know what I”m going to do yet, but keeping quiet is not something I do easily.”
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