Gerald Peters Gallery has three branches. For contact information, see below.
Gerald Peters has created his own art empire by building the market for it. He has been instrumental in transforming Western art from a parochial genre into a top-tier collecting category.
From the start, Peters has promoted traditionally undervalued artists of the American West such as Frank Tenney Johnson, while anchoring his inventory with bigger names like Georgia O'Keeffe. Yet equally important to his success is his ability to win over important collectors from very different backgrounds, from Texas oil barons to New York banking heirs. Peters capitalized on his Southwestern clients' interest in local subjects, while making the case for Western painting as a quintessentially American art form to his East Coast customers.
Peters opened his first Santa Fe gallery in 1972, specializing in painters of both the Taos and Santa Fe artist colonies. O'Keeffe remains a specialty of the gallery today but, in the meantime, Peters has expanded his offerings to include important modern and contemporary artists such as Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella and Alexander Calder.
While extending their reach with shows of classics like Picasso and Renoir, all three of Peters' galleries retain their own specialties. The Dallas gallery displays 19th-century European masters and blue-chip contemporary artists, the New York gallery shows 19th-century landscapes by the Hudson River School as well as 20th-century modern work from the Ashcan School and the Stieglitz Circle, and the Santa Fe gallery remains a center for both contemporary and classic Southwestern art.
With an ever-increasing volume of business has come the need to expand operations. Peters opened his New York gallery in 1992, and in 1998 he built a new $10 million gallery in Santa Fe that was designed to accommodate large contemporary art pieces and installations. At 44,000 square feet, the Pueblo-style building is one of the largest commercial art galleries in the country.
The Gerald Peters Gallery of Dallas, which opened in 1986, became Pillsbury & Peters Fine Art in 1999 when Ted Pillsbury, longtime director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, became head of the Texas management.
To staff his galleries, Peters hires ambitious, entrepreneurial people who could just as easily have their own galleries. Granted a large degree of autonomy, they develop the business on their own initiative. One department is then able to carry several others when sales are stronger in that area.
But Peters remains the driving force behind all of his enterprises. In addition to the art galleries, he also has a restaurant operation and significant real-estate holdings in Santa Fe.
At the new building, already a landmark in gallery-saturated Santa Fe, Peters remarked, "This place is about business, not just about fun." -- Anna Rohleder
Gerald Peters Gallery branches:
1011 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, N.M. 87501; Ph:(505) 954-7500
24 E. 78th St., New York, N.Y. 10028; Ph:(212) 628-9760
Pillsbury & Peters Fine Art, 2913 Fairmont, Dallas, T.X. 75201; Ph:(214) 969-9410