Episode 14: A Conversation with Lee Marks
Lee Marks Fine Art is located in Shelbyville, Indiana, which makes her a fellow Hoosier now even though she’s originally from the East Coast. It’s an odd place to be a photography dealer, but Lee makes it look easy. Maybe that’s because she has so much experience working with artists, collectors, and colleagues in the business.
Lee Marks
Photo by Jim Smith
Lee works with the photographers she represents very closely, helping with the publication of a number of impressive photo books. She recently opened a show of stunning work by Lucinda Devlin.
Lucinda Devlin, Langjokull Glacier, Iceland #1, 2018, pigment inkjet print, from the ‘Subterranea’ series. Image © Lucinda Devlin
Lee was a founding member and past president of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD).
The past 5 presidents of AIPAD
(L-R)
Robert Klein
Stephen Bulger
Catherine Edelman
Lee Marks
Richard Moore
After earning a BA in Art History from Connecticut College, Marks spent eight years selling prints and photographs and organizing exhibitions at Marlborough Gallery, New York. While subsequently establishing her own business as an art dealer, she also became a consultant to Pierre Apraxine, Curator of the Gilman Paper Company Collection, and catalogued what was long considered the finest photography collection in private hands. She contributed the extensive plate-notes for Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company (White Oak Press, 1985). In 2005 the Gilman Collection was acquired by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
As Lee says, looking at this book is a commitment.
Beginning in 1990 and over the next twenty years, Marks was consulting curator to the collector and former Dreyfus CEO, Howard Stein, and his foundation, Joy of Giving Something (JGS). The collection spans the history of photography, from the 1840s into the 21st century.
Sotheby’s held 175 Masterworks to Celebrate 175 Years of Photography: Property From the Joy of Giving Something Foundation on 11 December 2014, a memorable sale which made over $21 million dollars.
Paul Strand, The Family, Luzarra, Italy, sold for $281,000
Marks has co-authored photography publications with accompanying traveling exhibitions, including The Horse: Photographic Images, 1839 to the Present (Harry Abrams, 1991); New Realities: Hand-Colored Photography, 1839 to the Present (University of Wyoming Art Museum, 1997-98); Hope Photographs (Thames & Hudson, 1998), a book and exhibition of contemporary photographs circulated to ten US museum venues, 1998 through 2001; The Hidden Presence (Ceros / Librairie Plantureux, Paris, 2005), a collection of "hidden mother" tintypes; and "The Office/In and Out of the Box," shown at the Dorsky Gallery, New York City.
