BEHIND THE SCENES AT ONE OF THE SOUTHEAST’S largest art galleries, which happens to be the region’s oldest continually operating gallery, maestro Alan K. Avery uses his dynamic personality and eye for fine art to fill the gallery’s walls and provide the city’s designers and collectors with the best artwork he can find in the world.
Alan Avery Art Company has been introducing artists to the Atlanta market since the gallery first opened in 1981 in a downtown warehouse and operated under the name Trinity Gallery. A decade later, Avery and his business partners moved the gallery to Buckhead, where it still resides, for a total of 44 years in business. In 2005, Avery changed the gallery’s name when he became its sole owner. Alan Avery Art Company is known for representing artists at all stages of their careers—emerging, mid-career and established—in its 8,000-square-foot space.
Avery has transformed the gallery over time into the successful beacon of art it is today. About 18 years ago, he began a deliberate campaign to add more black and gay artists to his roster in order to level the playing field for all artists. Later, heeding the advice of a friend and businessman, he decided to level up the works previously shown in the gallery by adding more blue-chip artists while continuing to use his trained eye to find emerging talent. While he admits it was scary to change what the gallery was showing, it paid off in dividends.
While collectors are important to the gallery, so is Atlanta’s design community. Designers seek out Avery for his unique eye. “They often use me as their art expert and bring their clients into the gallery so I can help them start a collection,” he says. “I love imparting the knowledge I have about art and artists.”
Avery also works with Atlanta-area businesses to bring fine art into their workplaces. “I am often amazed and humbled when I drive through Atlanta to see there are few commercial buildings that I don’t have artwork in,” he says.
He is always scouting for new artists to showcase. This fall, he is featuring the work of several artists, such as New York-based Gregory Botts, a figurative and landscape artist with a modern edge. Prolific painter Larry Gray will open a solo show in the fourth quarter. The gallery also is spotlighting Nigerian artist Wole Lagunju. Lagunju’s work redefines Yoruba art and visual design. His cultural references are mined from eras of colonization and decolonization of the African continent, and his artwork critiques the racial and social structures of the 19th century while commenting on femininity. Avery also has recently signed contemporary landscape painter Jeff Snell and Atlantan Michael Howell to the gallery.
Avery is a big supporter of female artists. “My mother was a feminist; when the woman who helped raise me left my mother’s employment, my mother made sure she left with a home of her own in her own name,” Avery says. “She taught her never to be dependent on a man.” Remembering the lessons of his mother, he often represents underpromoted women artists, such as illustrator and photographer Gwen Gunter from Grayson, Georgia. “She had been painting for 50 years in different careers but was never represented by a gallery,” he adds. Gunter’s latest works are geometric paintings featuring irregular shapes that are animated by lines and bright colors; her work is described as whimsical and deliberate.
Avery always enjoys bringing experienced artists into the light. Another case in point: Peter Polites, who has a 50-plus-year painting career producing beach and marsh scenes. “I love bringing back older artists from being overlooked,” Avery says.
While he says the past decade was the “decade of the black female,” he predicts the next 10 years will embrace LGBTQ+ art and spotlight some undiscovered and underappreciated artists. He represents some of these emerging and established artists, such as fine art photographer David Clifton-Strawn of Atlanta, who is known for his portraiture through a contemporary queer lens.
Avery says a series of serendipitous events shaped his life and career. One of those was meeting Andy Warhol while standing in line trying to get into Studio 54 in New York City. “I was 15 years old, without a hope of getting in,” he says. “Warhol grabbed me and took me in.” It was there that he met the late artist Keith Haring, who is famed for his graffiti-like pop art.
Avery tells another story of painter Robert Rauschenberg, forerunner of the pop art movement, who called Avery and asked him to represent his work. Rauschenberg was known to blur the lines between painting and sculpture by incorporating found objects into his artwork. “Of course, I said yes,” Avery says. “He then introduced me to a host of other artists.” When he later spoke at Rauschenberg’s funeral, he said he couldn’t believe he was in the midst of the “royalty of artwork.”
A storyteller by nature, what Avery has dubbed his “accidental career” as an art purveyor and gallery owner actually began when he was a child. Saving his money from working in the North Carolina tobacco fields, he purchased his first Thomas Hart Benton painting when he was just 9 years old. “I have collected Benton’s work for most of my life and have amassed one of the largest collections that exists, more than any other museum or gallery but less than Barbara Streisand,” he says with a laugh. Today, Alan Avery Art Company has been granted access and rights to exhibit Benton’s artwork by his estate.
Avery has worked in a range of jobs and accrued training in all types of artistic endeavors. Schooled initially at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, he also earned degrees from Parsons School of Design and Georgia State and apprenticed with the Joffrey Ballet School. His first job in Atlanta was as a ballet dancer for the Atlanta Ballet, but it was a position at a local gallery frame shop that put him on the path to a gallerist career when he discovered he was good at selling and sourcing unique artwork.
Avery has been through his share of personal challenges, as he explains in story after story. He relays how he flatlined four times in the hospital while struggling through what is usually a fatal bacterial infection that he got from swimming in the ocean. A few months ago, he was robbed at gunpoint. Even further back, he was mugged and carjacked. His strong survival instinct and personal triumph serve him well as an entrepreneurial gallery owner. “Every time I’ve had a mistake or something devastating has happened, something better always comes after it,” Avery says.
Whatever the future brings, Avery is focused on keeping Alan Avery Art Company as the top Atlanta gallery. “I’m from the middle class and used to working hard,” he explains. “What I most want people to know about Alan Avery Art Company is that we have artwork that fits all price points. We’re not snobs here; we are friendly, down to earth and want to connect both new and established collectors with emerging artists. Art is an opportunity to introduce something new into your life. What we sell at our gallery are paintings that will make you want to keep going back; they keep you interested forever.” *
