Approaching her studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on October 31, the day after Hurricane Sandy swept through New York, Alyson Shotz could see that the building had been hit hard. Inside, she recalls, “things that had been at one end of the room were now at the other.” A sculpture she had been working on for a year — a wavelike steel structure too large to move to the second floor — had rusted beyond repair overnight.
Shotz is one of hundreds of artists and dealers still contending with the aftermath of the storm, which ravaged galleries, studios, homes, and museums across the New York area. By early December most Chelsea galleries had reopened, though many still lacked reliable phone lines. A full accounting of the losses will come only after insurance claims have been evaluated, artworks conserved, and studios rebuilt. Reuters suggested insurance losses for flooded galleries and waterlogged artworks may reach $500 million, roughly equivalent to the annual revenue of the entire art insurance industry.
Thousands of artworks are unsalvageable. Less than 5 percent of dealer Zach Feuer’s inventory escaped damage. In addition to the monumental sculpture at her studio, Shotz lost seven pieces that were stored in the waterlogged basement of her gallery, Derek Eller. Among the 50 artworks destroyed at Bortolami Gallery were two large-scale works on paper from Alighiero Boetti’s airplane series. “That was really painful,” says owner Stefania Bortolami. “The artist is dead, they’re from the ’80s — they’re just gone.”
Some dealers found themselves in negotiations with collectors whose art, though already paid for, no longer existed. “One collector wouldn’t consider a replacement work from the artist; another was fine with it,” says Eller, who estimates that well over 500 objects in his basement suffered water damage. “It’ll be case by case.” (On January 12, Derek Eller and five other galleries in his 27th Street building reopened with a festive block party.)
Some losses will be felt more profoundly by future generations. Soaked beyond rescue: countless archives from exhibitions held over the last 50 years, including artist Carter Kustera’s cage installation at the 1993 Venice Biennale and a pioneering new media exhibition, “Can You Dig It?,” held in 1996 at Postmasters Gallery, then in SoHo, to cite just two. “You have a certain hole in art history now,” says Magda Sawon, cofounder of Postmasters. “It’s a loss for the research field.” Printed Matter, a nonprofit dedicated to artists’ books and ephemera, lost 9,000 titles to the storm and suffered roughly $200,000 in damage to its Tenth Avenue storefront.
Further downtown in the West Village, the Martha Graham Dance Company is scrambling to salvage thousands of costumes, props, and sets that it stored in the basement of the artists’ residence Westbeth. Stretching back to the 1920s, the collection is worth more than $4 million, according to Janet Eilber, the company’s artistic director. The organization sent historic sets designed by Isamu Noguchi to dry in a Yonkers warehouse and turned over textiles to specialists at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “For conservation, we prioritized the dresses that Martha herself wore,” Eilber notes, “but this stuff was stuck in six to eight feet of water for six days.” The dancers will borrow costumes from the Joffrey Ballet for a performance this month in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Westbeth’s studios and affordable apartments — home to more than 150 artists — were also badly hit. Christina Maile reentered her studio to find two dozen wood sculptures she created over the last 20 years soggy and broken. “I’ve lived here for 40 years,” she says, “and I never felt vulnerable in this building before.” Maile was one of hundreds of artists faced with the choice to reconstruct what was lost or leave it behind. “I was with a friend the other day and saw a man in a hazmat suit carrying one of my pieces to the dumpster,” she recalls. “She said, ‘Oh, you should go get it.’ But I couldn’t. It will just recede into memory. You can’t recapture something like that.”
The catastrophe — and the likelihood that such a disaster will happen again — has some reassessing the viability of their neighborhoods. For galleries, taking even preventive steps can be complicated. “Moving all our art out to a separate storage unit at the warning of a hurricane? These costs can be carried by Gagosian, but I can’t accept them as operational costs for my gallery,” Sawon says. Sandy, she notes, has underscored the distance between the wealthiest galleries and the midrange players. David Zwirner, whose West 19th Street space was inundated with more than five feet of water, rebuilt walls and opened a new exhibition in fewer than 10 days after the storm. Most midsize galleries, in comparison, were closed for more than a month — and endured additional pressure in the period leading up to the December fairs in Miami.
Leo Koenig, whose gallery was flooded with more than three feet of water, philosophically regards the storm as an opportunity to improve his space. “We’ll switch offices, redesign things a bit better,” he says. “We might as well.”
This article appears in the January 2013 issue of Art + Auction magazine. It has been updated to reflect recent developments.