Art in America Feature Profile, December 2010     > download PDF

ON A WARM SATURDAY afternoon last spring, nearly 400 people lined up outside the contemporary art gallery Feature Inc. on New York’s Lower East Side for an event that promised “free art: one piece per person please.” Billed as “Power to the People,” the event was a “benefit” at which works donated by 263 artists—a number of them well-known, with lengthy résumés and pieces selling for tens of thousands of dollars—were given away to the public in a spirit of love and sharing. No money changed hands. Feature is sometimes mistaken for a nonprofit artist’s

space because of its grassroots attitude. In fact, it is a for-profit enterprise that has, over the last 26 years, helped launch the careers of Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince and Lily van der Stokker, among others, while continuing to pursue an adventurous program. “Power to the People” was scheduled for May Day, in many countries the occasion for celebrating the aspirations of workers—or in art-world terms, artists. Like the now-defunct gallery American Fine Arts, Feature has had a reputation for valuing art and artists above success and power,

which begins to explain why so many artists would donate their work to the event. Feature is presided over by its founderHudson (he goes by one name), a vibrant, exacting 60-year-old with a buzzed head and a dancer’s body. The gallery has regularly employed additional staff, but Hudson’s uncompromising art-centric sensibility permeates the entire operation. “Power to the People” was no exception: the benefit was an act of resistance to those aspects of the art world that, to many, have little to do with art.

 > read more (opens as a PDF)