Galerie Lelong: Dialogues: Galleries x Galleries with Luis De Jesus, Ivy N. Jones, and Mary Sabbatino; Kibum Kim and Friedrich Petzel; Diego Singh and Donald Johnson Montenegro

Welancora Gallery was founded by Ivy N. Jones. The gallery is located in a 19th century brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

In 2014, the gallery mission and programming were updated to reflect a greater focus on contemporary art and criticism. The broader mission of the gallery is to represent artists from around the world by placing their work with individual collectors and institutions; publishing scholarly catalogues and monographs; and, participating in art fairs. From time to time, guest curators and writers of color are invited to mount exhibitions and contribute essays to buttress the work on view. Derrick Adams, Greg Tate and Antwaun Sargent are a few of the artists, writers and curators that we have worked with on exhibitions at the gallery.

Mary Sabbatino is Vice President and Partner of Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. She was appointed director of the New York location of Galerie Lelong & Co. in 1991 and became a gallery partner in 2007. In 2021, she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) from the Government of France.

Championing a diverse roster of contemporary artists from throughout the world, the gallery has pioneered the community both in presenting a balanced roster of male and female artists, and artists from the Global South. Contributing to the overarching contemporary art scene, she served on the boards of ArtTable and the Executive Board of the Art Dealers’ Association of America, during which she initiated and co-authored the ADAA’s first code of ethics. Sabbatino served on the Selection Committee for Art Basel Miami Beach (2013-2020), the Art Basel Joint Selection Committee, and is a founding member of the Council for the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York. In 2020, along with colleagues from international galleries, she initiated the platforms Galleries Curate and SOUTH SOUTH. In addition to fostering the careers and legacies of the gallery’s artists, Sabbatino co-curated Art from Brazil in New York (1995) which presented the first solo exhibitions of the region’s most vital figures—Waltercio Caldas, Cildo Meireles, Hélio Oiticica, Mira Schendel, and Tunga—and curated Juan Downey: Video Installations and Drawings (1995), at the Museo Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile.

Kibum Kim works with Commonwealth and Council, a gallery in Koreatown, Los Angeles founded in 2010. Our program is rooted in our commitment to explore how a community of artists can sustain our co-existence through generosity and hospitality. Commonwealth and Council celebrates our manifold identities and experiences through the shared dialogue of art—championing practices by women, queer, POC, and our ally artists to build counter-histories that reflect our individual and collective realities.

Kim is a lawyer and writer, as well as the former Program Director of Art Business at the Claremont Graduate University. He specializes in art law and art market dynamics. Previously, Kim worked as an M&A investment banker at Société Générale and as a freelance journalist covering fashion and cultural trends. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the “Sunday Styles” section of The New York Times, Salon, Foreign Policy, and Hyperallergic.