An Interview with Margaret Lee

This is the third installment in the series It’s Not Business, It's Personal, which consists of interviews with people whose careers we find fascinating. The first two were with Emily Segal and Malte Müller.

This morning, I was thinking about when I first encountered 47 Canal, the gallery that my friend, artist and organizer Margaret Lee, founded. 

It immediately reminded me of an earlier time, when I was a little more new to New York and Cory Arcangel, who I was assisting at the time, was very generously taking me to galleries and showing me the ropes. One evening we went to a gallery where there was some event and a bunch of friends and family were there, and the space felt so wholesome and community oriented. I later learned that we had gone on an anomalous night; this gallery had a reputation for being scene-y and snobbish, and that was not the typical feeling an outsider might feel visiting that space. 

Years later, when I went to 47 Canal and started hanging out with Margaret and her partner Oliver, I realized that they were actually doing what I had assumed the other gallery was doing — the space was community oriented and idiosyncratic, with a group of people that seemed tight-knit and supportive of each other.

Something I’ve learned about Margaret as we’ve grown closer over the years is that the way she does things is very important. The way Margaret approaches her art practice, the way she works, the things in her life that she gravitates toward, and the things she feels critical about — everything is done with intentionality and principle.

Margaret and I have had regular phone conversations, scheduled every two weeks, for the past few years. In many ways, these conversations have been the catalyst for this series of interviews. 

The backstory to this conversation is that it’s actually the third interview we did. The first two conversations were wrought with technical difficulties. Last month, Margaret officially announced her retirement from working on 47 Canal and we figured it was a perfect time to see if the adage “third time's a charm” applied to us.

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Charles Broskoski: Recently, you decided to retire from 47 Canal, the gallery you founded 13 years ago. I know that a lot of factors go into making this kind of decision, but maybe a good way to start is to map out some of them…

Margaret Lee: So you want me to talk about why I retired from 47 Canal?

Cab: There are many factors to your decision, right? What is the order of importance, in your mind?

Margaret: The first factor was coming to the conclusion that retirement was in fact possible. Before Oliver and I started 47 Canal, I had founded a previous iteration on my own, the project space 179 Canal, so I had the belief that my essence was deeply enmeshed and perhaps the gallery could not continue without my active participation. When you build something from scratch, you feel your fingerprints all over, and it is hard to know what is and what isn’t an extension of you. 

Starting and running 47 Canal with Oliver demanded so much of my time and energy, I did not have a life outside of the industry. I really had to focus and narrow my scope. At some point, that tunnel vision became difficult for me. It’s really not in my nature to have my psyche be occupied so singularly... I’ve always been an almost pathologically curious person.

Starting the gallery allowed me to exercise that curiosity drive, but working to grow it into something more stable was a different experience. What was I supposed to do when the thing I was building seemed to be building momentum? Of course, keep it going. It seemed insane to stop while there was momentum. In some ways, the growth of the gallery created the opportunity to start seeing retirement as a possibility. 

Cab: When you say possibility, you're talking about practically, emotionally?

Margaret: Yes, exactly. Emotionally, can I be okay with the gallery existing without me given how much my ego was attached to it? 

Practically, I had to ask myself, “if I want to retire, what are the necessary conditions?” The practical was much easier to address as it all pointed to building internal infrastructure that is less dependent on a top-down founder led system. Essentially, I had to build up the infrastructure of the gallery to be less dependent on me.

It wasn’t until Oliver was presented with the opportunity to move into the former Brooke Alexander Gallery / Alexander and Bonin Soho space that it became 100% clear that this was the moment. When I met Oliver in 2010, he was a director at Alexander and Bonin gallery and I convinced him to quit that job to open 47 Canal with me. Moving into this SoHo space brings Oliver back to this part of his past. This was the sign we both needed. The physical space was the supportive infrastructure that could support the human infrastructure that we had built over the years. 

I don’t want to give the impression that there wasn’t any sadness attached to this process. But the lightness I felt removing the 291 Grand Street keys off my keychain and not adding the new keys confirmed I was making the right decision. 

Going back in time, for my first NY solo show in 2011, I wrote a short text that not so casually alluded to my discontent at being over-extended.

This economy forces double-fisting sometimes but mostly triple or quadruple. How much can you carry? I have 17 keys on my keychain and this show was made on stolen time. There are 4 pieces in this show and all of them are exactly what they are: backdrop painting of a jungle, oil on muslin, 10’ x 27’; cast watermelon, acrylic on plaster, 11” x 8” x 8”; zebra skin painting, oil on linen, 9’ x 6’; color photograph, 19” x 24”. Actually, 3 of the 4 are replications of what they are meant to be: a jungle, a zebra skin, a watermelon. – November 2011, NYC

I remembered how little time I felt I had to make that show.

Cab: Because of 47 and everything else that was going on…

Margaret: Yeah and my job working for Cindy Sherman. I felt tired and pulled in all directions, but didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to have my first solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery. All my friends were having their first solo shows at 47 Canal in the same year. I didn’t want to miss out. 

The text reads as a little confrontational, or getting off on martyrdom. I was all, “I'm working so hard, how about you … how much can YOU carry?” 

That time was so, so crazy and I was questioning why I was bothering trying to get my show up amid all the crazy. Despite that feeling, I never stopped making art.

These texts that I write for each of my shows show me where I’m at. Whether I really understood my current situation at the time or not, they allow me to look back and get some clarity as to where I was mentally over the years. Comparing the texts, I can map out change and growth. 

One of the hardest parts of deciding to retire was having to look back, which I hate doing. I hate nostalgia — I prefer to move forward. But in order to make these big life decisions, you have to do that work where you’re like, “where did I start? Where am I now? What happens in the middle? Am I good? Is this where I'm supposed to be? Or am I supposed to be somewhere else?”

I was 29 in 2009, when I started 179 Canal. Which isn’t that young. However, I spent all of my 20s after graduating from college, living a very unambitious professional life and having a lot of fun. 

I was not someone who graduated from college with a plan, which could have been pursuing an MFA, artist’s residency programs, etc…I also was rejected from most things I applied for, lol.

I was fortunate to have been hired to be an artist’s assistant right out of college, which provided me with a glimpse into how the industry worked. Having a part-time day job with flexible hours allowed me a certain amount of financial security — I could live without being too stressed about trying to sell art to pay the rent. That was something I was unwilling to trade in to go back to school. Besides that, I didn’t want to incur additional debt. 

Expanding my worldview was my first priority. When I was a child, my curiosity got me into a lot of trouble. I remember when I was 5, my grandmother came home from a trip she took with her senior group with a cuckoo clock from Switzerland. I became obsessed with the mechanics after seeing the clock do its cuckoo thing. I waited for an unsupervised moment and figured out how to get the clock off the wall and I somehow managed to break the clock in my attempt to figure out how it worked. 

I always seemed to get into trouble like this, and I drove my family crazy. Rather than encouraging my curiosity, my parents leaned into hard discipline, thinking that they could reprogram their “feral” child into a docile one. I won’t get into the specifics beyond saying that it was a grudge match, and while I developed grit, I thankfully never let go of my wild spirit, despite the constraints forced upon me. I could always find a crack to escape. Libraries were really important places for me as it was one of the places where my parents wanted me to spend time. But rather than being “studious,” I instead made a beeline to the magazine section. I would sit and read magazines for hours on end. I became a magazine junkie and anywhere I went, I looked for magazines.

Cab: What kind of magazines?

Margaret: Sassy and Seventeen, Ms. But I would read anything … Home & Gardens, This Old House, cooking magazines, National Geographic. I would flip through one page at a time. I’d look at every advertisement, taking it all in. I was insatiable.

Cab: Wow. Foreshadowing.

Margaret: I don’t recall reading the articles. It was mostly looking at pictures and creating narratives in my head — escape fantasies. As an immigrant kid with hard-ass, strict working-class parents, we lived a very small life. There was never time or money to travel or go on adventures. 

My dad, who only took two days off a year, Christmas and New Year Day, would drive us to places on Christmas Day. I have many family photos outside of places like Sesame Place and various museums. But we never went inside, because they were closed.

I felt my first taste of liberation when I went to college. Even though college was only 15 miles from home, I knew I was finally free and I vowed never to be constrained or limited ever again. 

Cab: Yeah, I’m connecting the dots. The impulse to open 179 was not about professional ambition, right? It was something like increasing your surface area for life…

Margaret: Yes, before opening 179 Canal, I tried to expand my horizon and life experience as much as possible. One of the most influential experiences was when I went to London on a work visa the summer between my sophomore and junior year of college. It was my first international trip outside of traveling to Korea with my family at 13. I had no plan of action, just landed in London the summer of 1999 and started looking for a job. Up until that point, I thought I would grow up to become a public school teacher. While I had fantasies about living a cultured and fabulous life, I was very much told that was not an option for me, and so I never felt entitled to that type of life. So I went to London thinking I would get a temp office job or work in a cafe and live simply. 

Instead, I ended up working in a restaurant that turned into a bar at night and had a little dance floor in the basement for the weekend. This experience was completely transformative. Beyond being really fun and exciting, I learned what it meant to be “back of house.” I had the most fun during staff family lunch and cleaning up at the end of the night. I remember being taught how to mop properly, how my boss took such pride in his mopping skills and passing them along to me. 

When the physical space that eventually became 179 Canal became available, I had the opportunity to re-create what I enjoyed about my time in London. I feel like people forget that the first couple events I threw in the space were dance parties, not art exhibitions. I had been curating a bit before officially launching 179 Canal, but it was never my intention to open an artist’s run space. I thought I could keep throwing parties until I realized how unsustainable it was, given the neighbors kept calling the authorities to complain. Organizing art exhibitions turned out to be much easier. 

Cab: It’s interesting, it seems like you’re describing the lack of professional ambition you had in your 20s, but it really emerged out of something like “community infrastructure.”

Margaret: Yeah I guess I should rephrase to say I was very ambitious to have an expansive life. I was willing to work very hard to find, meet, converse, and collaborate with like-minded people. But I never wanted professional success, because it scared me. I felt it would carry the same disciplinary baggage I so desperately escaped from.  

I made a lot of mistakes while running 179 Canal. Inexperience plus exhaustion and not yet knowing my limits. I didn’t want to continue to repeat mistakes, but still wanted to experiment. With 47 Canal, I learned what was possible with the development of stable infrastructure. Oliver excelled in that department, which is really how the gallery was able to become sustainable. 

Cab: There’s some correlation between what you’re talking about with regards to community infrastructure, or social infrastructure, and something we’ve talked about a lot, which is this metaphor of the oxygen mask, where the rule is you put your own mask on before you help someone else. Do you feel like there’s a balance that needs to be struck with personal infrastructure and communal infrastructure?

Margaret: Yeah, it is a very good question because when I was trying to be an art dealer, an artist, and a studio manager for a very successful artist, the infrastructure of my own life became very tenuous. For someone who values infrastructure and understands the importance of the ground, the base, and the structure of all things, my life structure felt like it was being held together with bubble gum. 

I experienced this most in my own art practice. I became so busy that I started outsourcing most of my production. I only had time for the concepts, I didn’t give myself the time to sit and work through my ideas concretely, within my own space and time. 

It was a clear sign that something was not right. I’ve always been someone who really enjoys making things, using my hands, understanding materials, etc. The COVID lockdown, though traumatic, gave a lot of us who were not working on the frontlines time to slow down. It was a time that I was able to return to a life closer to the life I lived as a child. Finding bits and bobs in the house and putting them together. That’s how I passed my time. Spending hours listening to music, the radio, finding new music, chatting on the phone with friends, fiddling. 

I had been running around seeking adventure and building an “interesting” life. What did it mean to stay put?  For me, it was reconnecting to a sense of place, looking at what it means to have spent most of my life living 10-15 miles from my place of birth. 

Born in the Bronx, raised in Yonkers, college on the Upper West Side, apartment living in Brooklyn and Midtown with a business in Chinatown — my cottage in Connecticut is the furthest I’ve ever lived from my place of birth, besides my summer in London. And when I drive to CT, I drive down a stretch of highway that I’ve been traversing my entire life. Doing that drive on a regular basis, I started noticing what is normally in my periphery — the infrastructure of the city that abuts the roads. It is mostly really fucked up and falling apart. I had a sinking feeling that most of what I was noticing has probably been falling into a state of disrepair the entirety of my life. The thought that a new, fancier, and exorbitantly expensive skyline was built atop a crumbling infrastructure — that maintenance and care of the street, the subways, the tunnels, the infrastructure that benefits all, were all deprioritized — that contrast really disturbed me. It triggered something deep in my psyche. It touched a memory trace that led me down a winding mental path. 

Cab: It’s wild. It feels like Mad Max.

Margaret: The markings and shapes I was observing pointed to areas that needed attention and were the results of years of neglect. Full confession, I took it personally and as a sign to start looking at my own cracks and fissures. 

Being obsessed with one’s personal infrastructure is not something I’m not comfortable with, but it is good to do regular check-ins. Look at the structure of one’s life: how’s the mental and physical health? Am I connecting with friends or isolating? Am I thinking about others and how I can contribute to the world, or am I stuck in a weird self-centered spiral? 

While being overworked led to a breakdown in my personal infrastructure, I have always enjoyed being a facilitator, to see a person’s potential and be a small part of their early creative life. It was a way for me to stay out of my own head. I still enjoy this and remain active in encouraging people’s projects outside of the creative field. 

When I started getting involved in local Chinatown/Lower East Side organizing and labor organizing, I felt the expansion that I’ve been looking for since I was a kid. Organizing with workers across trades allows me to be in the BIG world and in conversation with many different types of people, and oftentimes strangers! It was the remedy to my tunnel vision. 

I want to be useful to the world. I’m much more grounded when I’m involved in passing along the knowledge that people in my life over the years so generously taught me while I was desperately trying to figure things out in my youth. Within my own artistic practice, I hope that people can view my work and have a moment of contemplation. I stopped using my art to win arguments. I can’t control my narrative or how people perceive my work. That is a really hard thing to accept as an artist, but as I was working towards my retirement from 47 Canal, I had to work on my humility. Seeing how countless people contributed to the project. I might have been the founder, but that doesn’t mean I did it alone. And that means it can exist without me. 

Where I am at now is working on how I can be useful without feeling used.  How can I have a sense of self-fulfillment without an oversized ego? Can I be humble, but not self-deprecating? 

In your opening question, you said you thought my decisions feel like they have a lot of intention and principle behind them… 

Cab: Right.

Margaret: Looking back, perhaps it was more intuition than intention that guided me. I was lucky that things up to this point have worked out pretty well given I never had a master plan.

It is only recently that I feel I’m living a life of intention. It’s only now that I feel I have a deeper understanding of what that is, and stopped propelling myself forward, manically stabbing in the dark. Hits and misses, right? But going forward, I want fewer misses.