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History Is Written by the Gallerists

Three striking new gallery shows—Faith Ringgold, Richard Diebenkorn, and Julian Schnabel—show how gallerists work hard to steer perceptions and provide context to decades-old works. It’s harder than it looks.

Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold’s African American identity is essential to her art, but the New Museum retrospective that focused on the storytelling in her work also showed her great range of innovative materials and the syncretic influences that helped create her unique mix of textiles and painting. Here, Jack Shainman is picking up the baton. Photo: Anthony Barboza/Getty Images
Marion Maneker
December 16, 2025

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It’s been a long, event-filled art-selling season, and I’ve seen a lot of art in the last three months. But no matter how much you see, there are always some shows you can’t get to, so I tried to partly remedy that with a gallery tour late last week. My first stop was Jack Shainman Gallery, where I saw the inaugural show of the groundbreaking artist Faith Ringgold’s estate. Then I caught an uptown 6 train to Gagosian’s flagship at 980 Madison Avenue, where I finally got to see the Richard Diebenkorn show, also an inaugural of his estate. (Yes, the gallery is still showing art long after it was supposed to have vacated the building.) After that, I stopped in at Mnuchin Gallery, which is holding a show of Julian Schnabel’s plate paintings stretching back to the 1980s.