New York’s Tilton Gallery Closes After More Than Four Decades
175Sept. 26, 2025
TheTilton Gallery, a New York art world fixture since 1983, is set to close on November 15. Its last exhibition will be a show of work by German-born conceptual artist Ruth Vollmer (1903–1982), which opens September 30. In going dark, the gallery joins a slew of others that have shuttered in New York and Los Angeles in recent months as the art economy reckons with shifting tastes and buying patterns, steep US tariffs, and global financial, political, and social instability. The climate has affected established galleries including Venus Over Manhattan and Clearing as well as decades-old stalwarts Blum, Kasmin, and LA Louver.
Tilton Gallery was established in 1983 by Jack Tilton, who had worked for Betty Parsons from 1976 to 1982. Following her death that year, he inaugurated his gallery in her West Fifty-Seventh Street space before moving downtown to SoHo in the 1990s. Tilton Gallery moved to its Upper East Side home, at 8 East Seventy-Sixth Street, in 2005. Tilton died in 2017; his widow, Connie Rogers Tilton, had run the business since then.
“After eight meaningful years continuing the gallery without Jack, it is time to pursue my own projects in a more private setting and to reformulate my role in the art world whether through private sales or research projects,” wrote Rogers Tilton in a statement.
Tilton Gallery was known for elevating emerging artists and for bringing attention to those who might otherwise have escaped notice. The gallery was early to represent the work of Chinese artists including Huang Yong Ping and Zhang Peili in the 1990s. Others who showed there included Francis Alÿs, Marlene Dumas, Nicole Eisenman, David Hammons, Texas Isaiah, Tomashi Jackson, Glenn Ligon, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and Kiki Smith.