Bailey Tichenor (MA ’19), PhD candidate Michael Assis, and current MA student Katrin Zimmermann teamed up in June 2024 to create a unique pop-up gallery inside Zimmermann’s Harlem brownstone, which houses Ex Ovo, her jewelry design studio, and serves as a rental space for film shoots, exhibition openings, and evenings of jazz and spoken word performance.
Tichenor and Assis founded their online gallery, Artistoric, in 2020. By selecting historically significant objects and providing the kind of research usually limited to museum collections, they seek to bridge the gap between art galleries and museums and to respond to the art market’s growing interest in decorative arts and material culture. Artistoric’s collection focuses on pre-1900s ceramics and also includes glass, painting, works on paper, and furniture.
So how did Tichenor and Assis, based in Miami, find themselves collaborating on a pop-up exhibition with Zimmermann in Harlem? Tichenor saw a post on Bard Graduate Center’s Instagram about WNBA star Angel Reese wearing one of Zimmermann’s designs for a magazine cover, and she was intrigued. As she scrolled through Zimmermann’s posts, she learned about the brownstone.
While Artistoric is an online gallery, Tichenor noted that potential clients love to see and hold the objects that they are considering purchasing, and the gallery regularly exhibits at the San Francisco Fall Show and the Palm Beach Show. After learning about Zimmermann’s space, Tichenor proposed the pop-up exhibition of Artistoric’s ceramics. She said, “Katrin was on board from the get-go. She has been amazing.” This was the first time Artistoric had displayed objects in someone’s home, and Tichenor hopes “to do things this way from now on” because it can help potential buyers imagine how things might look in their own residences. Naturally, the pop-up attracted many members of the BGC community who were excited to learn about Tichenor and Assis’s unique business model and to see Zimmermann’s beautiful brownstone.
According to Tichenor, she started by buying a small collection of about thirty objects during the summer of 2020 and launched the Artistoric website in November of that year. Based on their knowledge of dealers and their clientele, Tichenor and Assis saw room in the market for an approach that might especially appeal to younger collectors. Many dealers have a physical location and their websites are a lower priority, so they may not include a lot of historical information, prices, or the opportunity to buy online. Tichenor and Assis focused on high-quality photography, a sleek and accessible website, social media promotion, and search engine optimization to make it easy for people searching for a particular object to find the Artistoric site.
Tichenor finds most of the objects she buys for Artistoric’s collection online as well. She scours auctioneers’ websites, and when she sees something that catches her eye, she asks for the condition report and starts her research. As Artistoric focuses on historically significant works, it’s important to know the object’s story. She said, “If all of those things align—an object with an interesting story in good condition and at a good price—I will bid on it.” Once she receives the object, her BGC training kicks in, and she does more research. “I am trying to help potential buyers learn about the artist, the style, the manufacturer, the period in which the item was made. I hope this approach will resonate with someone who might otherwise have walked on by or kept scrolling.”
Tichenor credits her BGC education with giving her the foundational skills to make the business run. She said, “There are very few programs similar to BGC. It really occupies a specialized niche.” Her BGC training shows up in her research, but also in her online curations such as No Ordinary Lustre: Daisy Makeig-Jones’s China Lustres and several others. The Artistoric website itself reflects much of what Tichenor gained by working in BGC’s Digital Media Lab, where she learned to use WordPress and collaborated with her classmates on an exhibition for the Grolier Club and digital interactives for BGC exhibitions.
Artistoric’s online-first model has been a hit. Since its founding, Tichenor and Assis have sold objects to private collectors, interior designers, museums, and at auction. Through Tichenor’s consistent and personalized marketing and media outreach, they have also received significant press coverage in outlets as varied as Veranda and cultbytes. Tichenor concluded, “I am a curious person, and this job gives me a chance to indulge my curiosity and the privilege of conducting research the way I learned to do at BGC.”
Zimmermann also found the pop-up exhibition to be a huge success and a wonderful extension of her studies at BGC. She hopes to rent the brownstone for similar events in the future.
