New Kids on the Block
Bored with New York City's art scene, Jamian Juliano-Villani and two close friends decide to make some noise by launching their own irreverent gallery.
Photography Anthony Urrea
“It’s 2-0-2-1. Dude, we’re so fucking stupid.” I’ve known Jamian Juliano-Villani for less than the length of a cigarette when she gives me the code to the VIP room at O’Flaherty’s, her new art gallery on Avenue C in New York. In truth, it’s more like a broom closet with a makeover. Framed photos of Kevin Hart, Faith Hill, and Paul Sorvino line the walls, which have been painted red, and balloons bump into each other on the floor. “You can’t be in here for more than a few minutes,” she says. “There’s literally no ventilation. But it’s still very. Fucking. Cool.” Maybe it’s because there’s something authoritative about the way she stomps, staccato- like, throughout the space; maybe it’s because she sounds like Al Pacino doing Carlito Brigante. In any case, nothing the 34-year-old former cheerleader from New Jersey says is up for debate. And, to be honest, at a time when everything is up for debate, that matter-of-factness is refreshing. It’s also really fun.
By the time we’ve been together for about 15 minutes, Juliano- Villani has suggested I take a shot of tequila, which she does more than once, each time sprinkling Tajin, a chile-lime seasoning, into her balled hand; she has played a YouTube video of a guy with ostraconophobia whose friends bind his arms and legs, throw him in a bathtub, and place live lobsters all over his writhing body; she has informed me that her miniature Australian shepherd, Timmy (named after the South Park character), has “wet diarrhea”; she has pranked me with a bogus “Win Streak” scratch ticket, which tells me I’ve won $25,000 (“You should see your face, dude!”); she has given me some O’Flaherty’s merchandise (a fly swatter, a T-shirt that says “Fuck McSorley’s” on the back, and a business card that reads “We’re usually not this drunk!”); she has asked me to whisper while we’re inside (following a blow-out fight between Juliano-Villani and the artist Kim Dingle over the gallery’s inaugural show, Dingle does O’Flaherty’s, Dingle’s primary gallery, Sperone Westwater, ordered a surveillance camera be installed so that Juliano-Villani wouldn’t try to rearrange the installation when no one was looking); and she has instructed me to ignore the many open tabs on her web browser (to that end, I’ll only mention “doll + big bust”).
The one thing that Juliano-Villani doesn’t really do is offer me a tour of her gallery’s debut exhibition. That’s not because she’s unhappy with it, but because the art is sort of beside the point, or at least not the point entirely. O’Flaherty’s, as indebted as it is to dive-bar culture, owes its spirit to New York in the rough-and-tumble 1970s and ’80s, a bygone time and place that only exists if you squint really hard. And yet it exists in Juliano-Villani herself, even as her blue-chip work goes for upwards of $400,000 at auction. The gonzo artist, represented by JTT Gallery in New York and Massimo De Carlo in London, incorporates into her surrealist sculptures and paintings references to Norman Rockwell as seamlessly as she does Disney-ish characters (decapitated) and barnyard animals (in Uggs).
Her technical skill, paired with her anarchic tearing down of art-world pretense, which The New Yorker has described as “admirably oddball,” has recently found Juliano- Villani, seemingly pulled from the periphery by her clip- on hair extensions, at the center of a new downtown scene. “Jamian is self-conscious and vulnerable,” says the provocative, Los Angeles–based artist Jordan Wolfson, “but at her core she is fearless and committed to her work and, ultimately, truth. That’s what makes her so extraordinary.”
With her friends and business associates Ruby Zarsky (one half of the popular disco act Sateen, with her partner Queenie Lopez) and Billy Grant (a painter and video artist, and a founding member of the influential art collective Dearraindrop), Juliano-Villani hopes to bring that reckless, flirting-with-disaster energy back to New York in the form of an art gallery that’s named after an Irish-American pub and looks like an insurance office. But talking about any of that without a drink makes her feel lame, so we lock up O’Flaherty’s in search of an espresso martini.
I felt like everyone making art was such a pussy. So instead of making art, I decided to do this with my friends. -Jamian Juliano-Villani
Ruby Zarsky: The question I hate getting asked in interviews, because I’m in a band with my partner, is, “How did you guys meet?” We get asked so often that we make up a new answer every single time. My favorite is when we said we met on a log flume at an amusement park.
L'OFFICIEL: Sorry, but how did you guys meet?
Jamian Juliano-Villani: Billy and I met about eight years ago, and we’ve been working together since. Ruby and I were best friends in high school, and we were in a really shitty band together.
L'O: What was the band called?
JJV: We were called Alphabet Soup.
NH: Maybe you should have called the gallery Alphabet Soup.
JJV: Because it’s in Alphabet City? That’s so lame!
Billy Grant: Nobody calls it that anymore!
L'O: Is this your first project together?
RZ: Yeah, technically. Jamian and Billy have been together for a while, but I’ve been making music.
JJV: They’re famous, bro. Over a hundred thousand followers!
RZ: Not really. We’re like The B-52s at the beginning of their career. Actually, Jamian and I did work together before. We were counselors at an art camp. We’d bring kids to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to show them a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, and whisper, “That’s a vagina!”
L'O: What made you decide to open a gallery together?
JJV: Honestly, I was really bored. I felt like everyone making art was such a pussy. So instead of making art, I decided to do this with my friends.
L'O: I would imagine that working with friends involves sitting down and setting up some parameters.
JJV: We’re not doing that.
BG: We have arguments.
JJV: Don’t you fucking look at me, Billy.
BG: I’m not looking at you!
JJV: You were looking at me when you said, “We have arguments”!
BG: [Looking down at the floor] We have arguments.
JJV: Look, we don’t really know what we’re doing. We haven’t sold anything. Can you imagine having to sell something? How do you ask people for money for art?
L'O: Explain this business model to me. You’re not representing artists.
BG: It’s a project space.
JJV: No, don’t say that! That sounds lame.
L'O: But you do offer a space to people.
JJV: And we give them carte blanche. Well, we’ve done it once. And that fucking backfired.
RZ: Let’s explain that. Kim Dingle came to the gallery, and she started to work on her installation. I’ll preface this by saying that we had sent her an exorbitant number of stressful emails being like, “We don’t like this. You need to change the hair on the dolls. Change the clothes. Change every little micro detail.” She was already really tense when she arrived, so we left her alone to put together her show. Then we all went to dinner—
JJV: And she’s fucking gluten-free! Just saying.
RZ: Okay, that has nothing to do with anything. So we’re at dinner and she’s telling us a story about Judy Garland and I’m really reading the subtext. Judy had this performance and somehow Kim Dingle wound up on the side of the stage while Judy was performing. She somehow befriended Judy’s hairstylist, so she’s with the hairdresser hanging out and when Judy gets offstage, all of a sudden all these celebrities of the time—
BG: Like Sammy Davis Jr.
RZ: Well, Sammy Davis Jr.’s wife. But, yeah, all these celebrities from the ’60s are like, “Oh my god, Judy! You were amazing!” But then they immediately pivoted away from her and started talking about their horseback riding plans the next day, completely excluding Judy. And I was like, “I get it. Kim’s the Judy. She’s worried we’re going to turn our backs on her and leave her out.” And that’s exactly what happened. We returned to the gallery after walking her back to her Airbnb, and Jamian was like, “We gotta fix this show!” She started moving things around and basically uninstalled everything Kim did and set it back up the way she wanted.
JJV: I put, like, a James Joyce book in one of the doll’s hands.
RZ: Billy and I had a foreboding feeling that it would backfire. So the next day, Kim comes in and has a complete conniption.
JJV: She actually slammed the door on me.
BG: I got there, and Jamian was locked outside.
RZ: Kim called her gallery while she was in there alone and they were like, “We don’t trust these guys. We need to get everything out of there now.”
BG: They were canceling the show.
RZ: Somehow the conclusion was met that the only way the show could proceed was if there was 24-hour surveillance of the gallery so that they could always check to make sure we hadn’t changed anything.
JJV: It sucks!
RZ: But we also kind of like it.
JJV: Someone from MoMA came in and we were trying to zoom in and listen to what they were saying about the show.
BG: I hate having to do walkthroughs with gallery people. I’m so bad at it.
JJV: I, like, tap-dance the entire time and end up making fun of everything. I should have hidden when you got to the gallery.
L'O: And then popped out?
JJV: No, I should have been like, “I’m taking a dump across the street.”
RZ: The first thing she usually says about one of her shows—
JJV: That it sucks!
We're bored if it looks good and everyone likes it. We'd rather get torn apart and have a horrible experience. -Ruby Zarsky
L'O: I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say anything good about a piece you’ve made or a show you’ve curated. Why is that?
JJV: I’m always proud of what I do, but if you set the bar really low, people are pleasantly surprised.
BG: And confused! Plus, the mess-up from this last show will push us over the edge to do a better job on the next one.
JJV: That’s the thing. We’re smarter than everyone else. I wouldn’t put anything out if I didn’t think it was good. But if I acted like I was hot and cool, people would be like, “Fuck that bitch.” I’m trying to get away with murder here, so I gotta act like I don’t like anything.
BG: You’re like a baseball coach whose team is so tired, but you’re yelling, “We gotta make one more thing! It’ll be so much better!” When we’re all cracked-out and having heart murmurs, you need that one final dopamine rush to make it perfect.
RZ: At the end of the day, Kim Dingle’s idea was probably better than your idea. Regardless, the best possible outcome to me is exactly what happened: it was sensational. That’s what we’re actually trying to do.
JJV: No one ever knows if it’s garbage or good.
RZ: And that’s irrelevant. The most important thing is the freak-out. For so many galleries, it’s a business. They’re looking to have things run smoothly. With us, we’re much more interested in being alive with it. The self-debasing is part of the process to create an atmosphere of mischief. We’re bored if it looks good and everyone likes it. We’d rather get torn apart and have a horrible experience.
JJV: For the next show, I wanted to do this stupid MacKenzie- Childs thing to pair with work by Allen Jones. But these two both got really fucked up last night and were like, “Jamian, no. We got to do exotic snacks. Exotic snacks are now.”
BG: We can’t do exotic snacks in 2022. They’ll be over by then.
RZ: They’re almost over now.
L'O: You’ve said that the gallery has a year lease in its current space, and that it could be a finite thing. In the back of your minds, though, you must be thinking about the long term.
JJV: I’m not telling you shit. If we tell people it’s only gonna be around for a year, they’ll get FOMO for it before it’s even gone.
BG: And who knows! Maybe we’ll adopt kids, start a lifestyle brand, and move upstate.
JJV: You know what? Fuck this. You wanna feel grilled, bitch?
RZ: Tell us your coming-out story!
BG: What’s the most romantic date you’ve ever been on!
JJV: If we were interviewing you, what would you want us to ask?
L'O: People don’t really ask me questions. But since you’re acclimated to being interviewed, how would you answer that question?
JJV: You bitch!
L'O: I feel like I haven’t yet gotten a straight answer about why you opened a gallery. Is anyone in New York doing art right?
JJV: DeviantArt.
RZ: Get ready to see the worst anime drawings of your life.
L'O: Is there anyone you actually look up to?
JJV: No one else is doing anything that’s risky.
BG: We don’t have a model. It’s like we’re trying to fit into a new box.
RZ: No, no, that’s not it. The thing is, we’re not basing what we’re doing on an art-gallery model. We’re on Avenue C and 4th Street, and you can really feel like you’re in old New York over there. Our idea isn’t even focused on exhibiting great art. It’s about resuscitating the feeling of old New York. Like Patricia Field or something.
BG: We definitely want our place to feel like a destination. You don’t really care what the show’s gonna be.
L'O: What's the last art show that made you feel something?
JJV: That's the trouble, I can't remember.
L'O: Because it's been so long?
BG: Because we were so drunk!
