Lauren Shooster came up with the concept for Shooster Arts & Literature — a gallery of fine art, antiques, and rare books that opened last month in Sag Harbor — in bed, where she spent the better part of the last five years recovering from a traumatic brain injury.
She had been working as an art director at the time of her concussion, and from one day to the next found herself unable to engage with her work, or with the world, as she always had before. She experienced frequent migraines, often resulting in vision loss, and the physical and sensory demands of working on photoshoots and carrying equipment were no longer practicable.
Confined to her room, alone, surrounded by a collection of artifacts she had accumulated over the course of years working in fashion and design, she experienced a shift in the way she related to those possessions — a perspective she now hopes to share with visitors to her gallery.
“In a lot of traditional art spaces, particularly in a white box gallery, you find that things live disparately. If you want furniture, you go to a showroom. If you want art, you go to a gallery. If you want books, you go to a bookstore,” Ms. Shooster said. “I wanted to create a space where all of that lives together.”
The gallery, a small, bright storefront in a former ship chandlery on Madison Street, houses a small selection of her personal collection of more than 300 works, which will rotate sporadically, and everything on view is for sale. “There’s an intentional opposition of influences in this space, across various centuries, design schools, artistic schools of thought,” she said. “I think each time someone visits this space they’ll have a different experience, but there’s a singular through line.”
Items on display at the time of the opening ranged from a Picasso — which quickly sold — to a display case containing drawings created during trials by her father, a civil rights lawyer, on the backs of legal pads and depositions. “I don’t think he himself ever identified as an artist. He must have thousands of those drawings, and that’s a perfect example of the type of work that I’m interested in,” she said. “There’s something interesting about interacting with work that wasn’t intended to be viewed by other people.”
She also cited as an example Rose deSmith Greenman, who produced more than 2,000 drawings within a span of about five years in her late 70s when, after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she “became obsessed with drawing flowers,” and Vivian Maier, who had worked as a nanny and was only recognized and celebrated as a street photographer when her work was discovered after her death.
The full collection, with the price and provenance of each item, can be viewed on the gallery’s website, along with roughly 300 essays written by artists, writers, and curators, commissioned by Ms. Shooster to further contextualize the work of the individual artists and designers featured.
“These are my personal effects. They’re tied to significant losses and achievements in my inner world. I want people to feel the inner life, not just of me, but of all the artists that I carry,” she said. “I mean, as art does for anyone, it allows you to see the world from a room.”
