After Tanya Weddemire Gallery sold two paintings by Nigerian-born artist Austin Uzor to the esteemed Clark Collection at EXPO Chicago this year, one of the first things the founder Weddemire did was call the artist.
The works, HIBISCUS and LAND DEVOTION V (both 2026), were entering a U.S.-based collection that also owns works by artists including El Anatsui, Zanele Muholi, Amy Sherald, and Kerry James Marshall. For Weddemire, telling Uzor what had sold, for how much, and to whom was fundamental to her view of how a gallery should operate. That meant a lot to Uzor.
“Transparency is something that I stand 10 toes down on,” Weddemire told Artsy. “One of the reasons why I started this gallery was that I heard from many artists that they were never being paid by their galleries. And I said, ‘How could someone take someone else’s work and not pay them for it?’” For her, that transparency is “an extension of stewardship.”
That philosophy—part stewardship, part market strategy—has shaped how Weddemire has built the gallery since opening it four years ago. Her approach combines transparency with a close attention to the cultural contexts of the artists she works with, many of whom explore questions of migration, identity, and the African diaspora.
Next week, the gallery will make its debut at The Armory Show, where this year’s Caribbean focus offers a particularly fitting context. Its booth will feature a duo presentation of Nigerian-born Uzor and Jamaican-born O’Neil Scott, whose works approach migration, identity, and memory from different points within the Black diaspora. For Weddemire, the presentation brings together many of the ideas that have guided the gallery from the beginning: cultural fluency, careful career-building, and an effort to connect artists’ individual histories with broader audiences and collectors.
Building a different gallery model
REVIVAL , 2026
Kaylyn Webster
Tanya Weddemire Gallery
Weddemire founded the gallery in 2022 after spending around 25 years working in luxury retail and wholesale. She had studied art and design at the University of Pennsylvania and remained interested in art throughout her career. But she was increasingly struck by what she saw as the underrepresentation and misunderstanding of artists of color, as well as stories from artists about opaque gallery practices.
“Art has always been something I’m curious about,” she said. “I wanted to make sure that I did something that I knew I had enough knowledge on [and] I could have a solution [for].”
She also wanted to make the strength of the strong collector base within the African diaspora more visible and help preserve stories she believed were culturally significant. She believed her experiences would be useful in the art world, so she left to start her gallery in 2022. Today, the gallery represents Scott, Lamar Bailey, Moses Salihou, Candice Tavares, and Kaylyn Webster, and has a working agreement with Uzor. Across their practices, questions of identity, heritage, and Black narratives recur.
SHOWER ME WITH YOUR LOVE, 2026
Candice Tavares
Tanya Weddemire Gallery
Weddemire’s years in luxury also inform the gallery’s behind-the-scenes mechanics. She and her team study pricing, collector behavior, sales data, research, and budgets to understand who is responding to an artist’s work and to make decisions about how that work is positioned in the market.
At the same time, she develops longer-term strategies around each artist’s trajectory, considering their goals, themes, and ambitions when deciding which fairs and other contexts might best serve their work.
Cultural fluency as strategy
Cultural fluency is equally central to that approach. Weddemire was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where she lived until moving to New York at age 11. She believes her experience as a Jamaican immigrant gives her another point of connection with artists whose work emerges from migration, diaspora, and Black identity.
This familiarity often crosses boundaries. At EXPO Chicago, Uzor presented CONFLICTING SPACES: LETTERS WITHOUT RETURN ADDRESSES (2026), an installation incorporating a corner of a house with a zinc roof. Although the work emerged from a Nigerian experience, Weddemire recognized something familiar in it: She had grown up seeing the same kind of roofing in Jamaica.
For her, those points of recognition matter when speaking with collectors about an artist’s materials, imagery, and cultural references. “I can translate the information on where their work is coming from to the collector [on] material, composition, color, style, [and] narrative, which is where I feel that I have made that connection,” she said.
Those overlaps between individual histories and broader diasporic experiences are central to the gallery’s Armory Show presentation. Scott explores memory and migration through his experiences of Jamaican and American culture in artworks such as SUNDAY TO SUNDAY (2026). Uzor, meanwhile, approaches migration and displacement through a Nigerian lens, exploring the psychological and physical experience of occupying spaces that may no longer feel like home.
A broader sense of stewardship
I'LL BE ALWAYS WITH YOU, 2025
Moses Salihou
Tanya Weddemire Gallery
TAKE THE SHOT, 2026
Lamar Bailey
Tanya Weddemire Gallery
For Weddemire, these themes are also personal. When Hurricane Melissa brought catastrophic destruction to Jamaica in October 2025, she organized a donation drive and an exhibition in Los Angeles, with proceeds benefiting people affected by the storm.
“I grew up with a grandmother who I saw do everything in the community and share with the people we lived amongst. And so that’s ingrained in my DNA, and also my mom and my family,” she said. “It’s a very high responsibility for not only my personal cultural roots but the cultural roots of every single person within the gallery.”
OUT HERE , 2026
Brooke Fierce Bronner
Tanya Weddemire Gallery
Four years after opening the gallery, Weddemire wants its growth to remain as deliberate as its beginnings. She hopes younger people considering careers in the arts might see in it another model for what a gallery can be.
“What I would like people to pay attention to with the gallery is how intentional we are and where we’re going,” she said. “[I want] young people who are thinking about a career in the art space [to] look at my gallery and say, ‘You know what? This truly inspired me to take art in a different direction [from the norm].’”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/gDkA0jr
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