Pearl Street Gallery occupies the second floor of a 1910 cast-iron building at 88 Pearl Street, in the Financial District of Manhattan. The space is 4,800 square feet, divided into three sequential rooms, with one wall of north-facing windows. We mount one and a half exhibitions per year — never more — and publish a catalogue for each.
Pearl Street began in 2014 as a private archive of correspondence between Edward Hopper and a small circle of dealers, collectors, and museum directors in the years 1925 to 1955. The archive was assembled by Helen Carrère, then a curator at the Whitney Museum, over the course of a single sabbatical year.
Two years later, in May 2016, the gallery opened its doors with Hopper: A Survey — twenty-six works drawn from twelve private collections, none of which had been seen in New York since the 1970s. The exhibition ran four months and was reviewed in The New Yorker, Artforum, and the Burlington Magazine.
In the ten years since, the programme has widened from Hopper alone to a close circle of American modernists working between 1900 and 1945. The archive remains the gallery's working method: each exhibition begins with three to five years of correspondence research, and concludes with a printed catalogue that publishes new material.
Before Pearl Street, Helen Carrère was a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2008 – 2014), where she co-organised the 2012 retrospective Edward Hopper: A New Look at the Watercolors. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Columbia University.
Marcus Adeyemi joined Pearl Street in 2019 after five years at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He led the 2021 exhibition Lake George: Early Watercolors and is currently preparing a 2027 monograph on Arthur Dove.
Eun-Jin Park manages the gallery's loan registry and working archive. She trained at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU) and previously worked in the registration department of the Hirshhorn Museum.
Most contemporary galleries in New York mount between six and ten exhibitions per year, a rhythm imposed by art fair calendars and the velocity of the secondary market. Pearl Street has consciously stepped out of that rhythm. We open three exhibitions every two years, with each running three to four months and supported by three to five years of archival research.
This pace has consequences. It limits our audience to those willing to come twice in a season, rather than once a month. It limits our financial scale. But it allows us to publish catalogues of record — eleven of the fourteen so far have been acquired by the Frick Art Reference Library and the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum.
The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm. Admission is free. Catalogues are available on site, by mail order, and at the Strand Book Store on Broadway. Sunday viewings are arranged by appointment.
Plan a visit