After nearly a decade in Brooklyn, Jenkins Johnson Gallery will soon return to Manhattan via a collaborative partnership with Marian Goodman Gallery. Beginning in November, Jenkins Johnson will rent out the third floor of Marian Goodman’s Tribeca headquarters, mounting exhibitions periodically over the next 12 months.
“The current culture moment calls for galleries to come together creatively, and the alliance between Marian Goodman and Jenkins Johnson embodies the cooperative spirit fundamental to international arts community,” Karen Jenkins-Johnson, the gallery’s founder and principal, told ARTnews. “It’s important for reaching a global art world that we have solidarity and find new opportunities for mutual benefit.”
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This new alliance arose from conversation Jenkins-Johnson began 10 months ago with Marian Goodman’s four partners, Rose Lord, Emily Jane Kirwan, Leslie Nolen, and Junette Teng. Both her gallery and theirs are longtime members of the Art Dealers Association of America, which Jenkins-Johnson described as being “particularly fertile ground for forming collegiate cooperation.”
In an email to ARTnews, the Marian Goodman partners wrote, “We are beyond enthused by the opportunity for gallery visitors to be exposed to both distinct programs via proximity to each other. We hope this type of alliance might be an inspiring model for other ADAA member galleries from different cities. We also felt that this arrangement with the esteemed Karen Jenkins-Johnson, along with the flexibility it allows for both galleries, is absolutely in keeping with our commitment to working with respected and forward-thinking voices in the cultural sphere.”
Karen Jenkins-Johnson at “Infinite Hope,” 2025, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco.
Courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery
Jenkins-Johnson founded her namesake gallery in San Francisco in 1996 before expanding to New York in 2005. She opened in Chelsea just as the neighborhood was beginning to grow into the gallery hub it is today. Her space there ran until 2013, though the gallery maintained an office on West 25th Street until 2017, when it opened Jenkins Johnson Projects in Brooklyn, not far from the Brooklyn Museum.
Jenkins-Johnson said that she felt the project space had “run its term,” and that the decision to return to Manhattan was in part based on low foot-traffic to the Brooklyn outpost. The gallery will still maintain that location on Ocean Avenue, but the focus of its New York activities will be in Tribeca. “With what’s happening globally, it just makes sense for us to do this,” she said.
Prior to the conversation with Marian Goodman Gallery, Jenkins-Johnson had already been considering a move to Tribeca. “Tribeca right now has an undeniable vibrancy,” she said. “You can feel it when you’re in the galleries, when you’re walking the sidewalk. That energy is conducive to supporting the gallery’s artists, and this new space creates the opportunity for our artists, many of whom remain underrepresented and overlooked. It allows for us to do ambitious exhibitions, and it’s accessible in a way creates a new kind of visibility for our program.”
Over the past nearly 30 years, Jenkins-Johnson Gallery has established itself as one of the most important galleries supporting the work of Black artists. It currently represents around 20 artists, including Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Gordon Parks, Dewey Crumpler, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Aïda Muluneh, and Enrico Riley. It has also exhibited the work of artists like Roy DeCarava, Romare Bearden, Robert Colescott, Ming Smith, David C. Driskell, and Renée Cox.
Lola Flash.
Photo Christa Holka
The Tribeca space’s inaugural exhibition, opening on November 8, will be a solo show for photographer Lola Flash. As part of the opening, Flash will speak with Rhea L. Combs, the director of curatorial affairs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
“I feel like this is a particularly important show that will set the tone for the space,” Jenkins-Johnson said. “Lola’s importance historically needs to be celebrated, and the topics of Lola’s work feels urgently relevant in our current cultural context.”
Flash, who has been represented by the gallery since 2022, is best-known for “Cross Colour” series, in which she inverted the colors of her images as a conceptual approach to discuss the marginalization and demonization of the queer community during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ’90s. More recently, she has created various large-scale portraits, many of them featuring trans people of color.
At a moment when the Trump administration has targeted the Smithsonian and condemned certain artworks, Jenkins-Johnson said it’s important for a gallery like hers, one of the few in the United States that is Black-owned, to stand up against censorship and “to not be bullied but to be socially conscious and to let our artists speak their minds. They have the right in America to be who they want, to say what they want, and to present what they want—and that’s what you’ll see in our exhibitions in Tribeca.”
The past two years in the art market have been marked by uncertainty, with buying down from the astronomical highs of just a few years earlier. “The health of the world economy is really a question of how galleries have to learn how to penetrate and survive in the international art world as it is,” Jenkins-Johnson said, pointing to how President Donald Trump’s threat to impose new tariffs on China caused stocks to fall sharply.
She continued, “The health of the galleries is very strong, but you have to be creative in business. You have to be creative with how you do your business. The world is changing, and you have to change with the world. You can’t stay stagnant. There’s not one business model that doesn’t evolve over time.”