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Unlike Chelsea, there’s a scarcity of high ceilings and wide walls on the Lower East Side’s tenement-lined streets. The focus here is on thinking outside the white box, for artists and dealers alike. “I could never move!” exclaims Miguel Abreu, whose claustrophobic, postage stamp–size space at Hester and Orchard was one of the first in the neighborhood, and whose high-quality, small-scale conceptual program has helped define Lower Orchard art. “It would be a complete and total betrayal of everything I’ve worked for, in a spiritual sense.”
So if the perfect big white cube became available—say, next to the New Museum—he would of course have to say no, right?
“Spiritually,” he says, chuckling. “But businesswise? That’s another story.”
