Gallery 98 Business Card, 2015
Business cards are a well-established and well-regarded category of paper collectible. Both the Smithsonian and the Victoria and Albert Museum holdings include many such cards. Like any other business, art-world enterprises use this mode of advertising often with some added artistic flair.
Gallery 98 presents a selection of some of the art-world business cards in our inventory. The links below lead to other art ephemera connected to the artists and galleries featured in the cards.
The artist Colette found that business cards were an inexpensive and convenient way to let people know about her exhibition at the Braathen-Gallozzi gallery (1981).
John Holmstrom was the editor and in-house cartoonist for Punk Magazine. Here he applied his lettering skills to create a business card that reflects the magazine’s cartoon aesthetic (c. 1977).
Edit deAk and Walter Robinson, the co-editors of the independent low budget magazine ART-RITE, are listed on this card with separate phone numbers. When did Robinson, always credited as “Mike Robinson” in ART-RITE actually change his name to Walter?
A card for a short-lived project for a conceptual art business that provided clients with “esthetic services” features the artist dream team of Peter Fend, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince and Robin Winters.
Art writer Alan W Moore had just arrived in New York and was working as an intern at Artforum when he created this business card in the early 1970s.
This 1986 card provided artist Rebecca Howland with an inexpensive way to let people know that her Transmission Tower sculptures were on display at the alternative art space P.S. 1, a huge, former schoolhouse that always featured multiple exhibitions.
Nightclub promoter and party curator Baird Jones always handed out cards for upcoming events in the 1980s. This reusable, permanent pass for the Underground has the wear and tear of a much-used card kept in a wallet.
In the early 1980s Mel Neulander and Joyce Towbin’s Graphiti Productions Inc. worked with graffiti artists on commercial design projects. Their art gallery Graffiti Above Ground opened in Greenwich Village in 1982.
The ever-accessible artist Donald Baechler seemed to be in every group show in the 1980s.
This minimalist card of German gallery owner Heiner Friedrich has the address of his New York gallery (1971-77) on one side, and the address of his Cologne gallery on the other. Friedrich married Phillippa de Menil and together they founded Dia Art Foundation in 1973.
Printing business cards was so inexpensive that sometimes a passing fancy could make its way to print. Artist Joseph Nechvatal has no memory whatsoever about what he was planning when he created this card c. 1986.
