Overcoming ageism in the world of art

In Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood on West 28th Street is the Carter Burden Gallery, a nonprofit art gallery with an exclusive mission: exhibit professional artists ages 60 and over. The goal is to overcome ageism in the arts. Every month, the gallery receives over 100 submissions, but with only 10 shows a year, a very small group of artists are selected for Carter Burden Gallery’s exhibition space. Currently, the youngest artist is 60 and the oldest is 92. The gallery has three exhibition spaces: a west gallery, an east gallery and an outdoor installation space outside the west gallery.

Carter Burden Gallery is a part of the larger Carter Burden Network, a nonprofit dedicated to providing a plethora of arts and culture as well as health and wellness programs to aging populations. It was established in 1971 by then-New York City Council Member Carter Burden, and then in 2009, the Carter Burden Gallery was founded.

New York Nonprofit Media spoke with Marlena Vaccaro, curator and director of the Carter Burden Gallery, about the mission of the gallery, the current state of the art world and overcoming ageism. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did Carter Burden Gallery come to be, and what’s the mission of Carter Burden Gallery?

The overall Carter Burden Network mission has always been to give older adults a voice. So to parallel that mission, the gallery’s core mission is to give older professional adult artists a wall, meaning an exhibition space. If you’ve got a wall to put the work up, then somebody’s hearing or seeing you. We’re in our 15th year of having the gallery. It began because we merged with a small not-for-profit that was doing craft education for older adults at their centers and programs. We then inherited a space. Whenever I see a space, I think: gallery and exhibition, because it was a nice space. So all we did was paint the walls white and throw up some lights, and thought maybe there might be a whole world of older artists out there that aren’t being recognized and aren’t being given the opportunity just simply by virtue of their age, not being viable even for consideration in what is arguably the art capital of the world. Then we sent out a letter to 500 visual artists that were over 60, and from the 500 artists that we sent the letter out to, we got about 2,000 responses, because each of them told everybody they knew. We then realized we were on to something. There obviously was a whole world of older professional artists who were suffering from the same kind of ageism that many older adults experience.

We started show by show and it was so immensely needed and paralleled the network’s vision. Clearly, people don’t change when they hit a certain age, you don’t become less than what you were. And for a lot of people, a lot of people become more of who they were. And again, the art world is a pretty ageist and sexist world. We do our little part to say “Keep your eyes on the prize here, because these are people who have a tremendous amount to say and a tremendous amount of talent.”

Why do you think older artists tend to be overlooked in the art world?

It’s still true that as people get older, their value in the eyes of many younger people diminishes. We are a very youth-oriented culture, and most of the time in the art world, and this is probably true everywhere, people are looking for the next new thing, the emerging talent, the emerging artist, everybody with a new idea. But ideas don’t have an age. To have a new idea, you don’t have to have a particular age attached to it. Older artists, like all artists just keep working at it and advancing their practice. Everybody’s an individual, and we don’t base anything here on anything but the quality of the work. Everybody who we show is 60 or over, but that’s the only thing anybody has in common. Then we simply look at the work.

I would imagine there’s really no age to put on art. If you’re inspired, you’re inspired regardless of whether you’re young or not.

Everybody’s different. Some people I’ve met, people who are not artists, they tell me they’ve never been happier in their life. They’re 80 and they’ve never been happier. Families are great. Their kids are grown. Their grandkids are great. This is a point in their life where they’re taking care of themselves and doing a lot of things they couldn’t do because of responsibilities. Many artists have to work day jobs, but for artists over 60 or 70, a lot of them aren’t working a day job anymore, so they’re able to devote 100% of their time and energy to doing the thing that they’ve always done. None of the people we show made enough money from painting to make a living, everybody has to have a job. As you get older, one of the nice things is you might not have to have that job any longer, and you can commit fully to your practice. In a sense, a lot of the artists that are at the Carter Burden Gallery are embracing this newfound freedom and embracing it through art.

The mission speaks directly to my belief system. The work that the whole Carter Burden Network does is about change. It’s about seeing things in a new way, seeing people in a new way, and looking at aging as a positive thing and not a negative thing. And all of our programs have that same message. We’re unique in the world. We’ve never actually found another professional gallery that focuses solely on older artists.

A lot of how art is distributed nowadays is through social media. How does Carter Burden Gallery ensure artists are up to speed technologically to ensure their work is being seen?

When we first started out 15 years ago, no one distributed their art through social media. No one understood what it was or how to do it. So we started out with a lot of technical training and getting young people in to show the artists how to do it, how to set up a website, how to set up an instrument, how to do all those various things. They had fun with it. It is amazing how proficient everybody is now. That’s an artist's job, to get out there and advocate for yourself and show the world. I can give you one show, there’s 360 other days that you need to show (your artwork), so people are very, very active on social media.

What do you think is needed from the art world to ensure it overcomes ageism?

Just to look at people and say, “Can I see the strengths rather than the weaknesses? Can I take a minute and try to find all the value in each person that we meet, whether it’s an artist or not, to just recognize the value and not think it’s associated with any kind of age or any kind of agenda?”

I can tell you that nobody who’s 60 or 70 or 80 feels any differently than they felt when they were 20 or 30, other than when they look in the mirror, but inside of you, your creative spirit, your vitality, it doesn’t change. It doesn’t age at all.