New York’s Massey Klein Gallery will close its doors after nine years, saying that after initial success, the numbers no longer add up to pay for its showroom on the Lower East Side and support the dealers’ family and the gallery’s artists.
Husband-and-wife team Garrett Klein and Ryan Massey felt called by their Christian faith to open the gallery, and say they’ll continue on with nomadic projects. They announced the closure in a Saturday Instagram post. The gallery’s current show, of Kate McQuillen, is extended through November 20.
The gallery has participated in prominent fairs including the Armory Show and NADA in New York, Untitled in Miami, and the Dallas Art Fair. At NADA New York in 2025, ARTnews’s Harrison Jacobs noted its display as one of the fair’s best.
“Our relationship with God has informed what we want the gallery to feel like,” said Klein in a phone interview. “We’re all accustomed to feeling uninvited at galleries. We wanted to create a place of warmth.”
“Previously, sales were up steadily, and we were hitting benchmarks each year,” said Klein. “But four years ago, we started to go into decline. We were hoping that by this point we would start to see a leveling out. We’ve always been sensitive to the numbers. We never had a large nest egg to start a gallery. We have to sell the work. We’re religious, and it seemed like we were pushed into this place where we could take that leap of faith but with the numbers declining so much we’ve had to figure out other jobs to do.”
The couple opened with just enough to secure a lease and cover a month’s rent, says their farewell announcement. Both the founders had worked at other New York galleries, Klein principally with Bertrand Delacroix and Massey at Mulherin and Pollard. “We were blessed with some amazing sales right out of the gate,” said Klein. But the gallery sells works by emerging artists in the range of $3,000 to $20,000, and has to sell $30,000 to $40,000 a month to comfortably cover expenses, including rent, which comes in at a little under $10,000 a month for the 1,000-square-foot gallery.
Massey Klein has been a small operation all along, and currently represents just six artists—Chrissy Angliker, Lydia Baker, Bethany Czarnecki, Jude Greibel, and Laura Sallade, along with McQuillen. Klein says they’ve done their best to keep the artists abreast of the challenges so that this news wouldn’t be a shock.
Many galleries have closed in recent months in a challenging market, some of them putting out farewell statements that blamed the art market system, some closing amid legal battles, some simply saying business had fallen off a cliff and prices for services like storage and shipping have implacably risen. Massey Klein’s signoff may be the only one that discusses a prayer practice that was intertwined with the gallery. Klein said he would usually start his day with a brief mediation and prayer, and that they had sometimes invited others from their Christian church community to prayer events.
As for the future, the dealers hope to continue showing at some of the art fairs they’ve previously participated in. They will still participate next year in New York’s Split Level art fair, its third edition, and will continue to organize art displays with Groupe NYC, a collective of clothing designers with a showroom on the Bowery nearby.