The Hollywood Reporter profiles LA’s Maggie Kayne of Kayne Griffin Corcoran, a 29-year-old gallerist who stumbled into art dealing:
Despite her obvious enjoyment of the job, Kayne says gallery ownership was never the plan. Not that she really had one. After graduating high school in 2002, she drifted in and out of college — from Berkley to NYU to USC – unmotivated, unsure of what she wanted to do. It wasn’t until a friend began picking up artworks like Basquiat drawings and Warhol polaroids –that the light bulb went off. “I realized that I could participate in contemporary art,” explains Kayne. “[It] was not just the A.P. class that I had to memorize paintings in.” With the support of her father, wealthy financer, Richard Kayne, she began collecting herself — a Ken Price here, a Craig Kauffman there — while taking on internships at LACMA and local gallery, Overduin and Kite. “I needed exposure and work experience in order to figure out my path,” says Kayne. “And I wasn’t going to get it in school.”
Today, Kayne’s lack of a formal art history education — or rather the iconoclastic streak which prompted her to reject one — is proving an asset. “The L.A. art world has for a long time itself been missing,” says Turrell. “But that has changed and that change is represented by people like Maggie coming into it. It’s sort of reinvigorated what’s always been possible in L.A., but at a much higher level.”
Hot on the Scene L.A. Gallerist Maggie Kayne on Contemporary Art (The Hollywood Reporter)
