Two New York Dealers Launch a Gallery for Artists With Disabilities

Rachel Carle Cohen and David Fierman aim to build on the success of the Open Invitational art fair in Miami last December.

by Brian BoucherJuly 8, 2025

As the art world continues to work to resolve longstanding issues around accessibility, a pair of New York dealers is launching Open Studio, a downtown gallery that will be fully devoted to work by artists with disabilities. Founded by Rachel Carle Cohen, of Shelter Gallery, and Fierman’s David Fierman, it will focus on those who make their work at progressive art studios (also sometimes called supportive art studios or disability art studios), which began in 1974 with the Bay Area’s Creative Growth. At these facilities, artists with various disabilities are supported in living as artists and also get support in their day-to-day lives.

The distinction between art by untrained artists and the more professionalized art world is increasingly porous, as the Outsider Art Fair draws heavyweight visitors year after year and self-taught artists gain greater institutional acceptance. (See, for one shining example, artist Marlon Mullen’s recent solo show at the temple of Modernism, New York’s Museum of Modern Art.)

Fierman opened his namesake Lower East Side contemporary art gallery in 2016 and has to some degree focused on overlooked, queer, older, and indigenous artists; lately, Fierman has increasingly shown artists with no formal training. Chelsea’s Shelter, since its first exhibition in 2019, has shown emerging artists, with a focus on those left out of the mainstream. Both galleries have participated in prestigious art fairs like NADA and the Outsider Art Fair, and they and their artists have earned notice in publications like the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Artforum.

The new gallery’s name Open Studio was chosen in keeping with a spirit of leveling of boundaries. “We would like to be in a world where you wouldn’t know if an artist had a disability—and it wouldn’t matter,” said Fierman in a conference call with Cohen.

Open Studio throws open its doors July 10, on the hip gallery stretch of Henry Street in the Lower East Side, with a solo show of John Tursi. New York Times critic Roberta Smith once wrote that he came close to “genius status,” saying that his works “dazzle.” The artist works at the Living Museum at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, whose director has described him as having a learning disability and “symptoms from various psychiatric afflictions.” Complementing the new gallery is the show “Introducing Open Studio: New Art by Artists with Disabilities” a one-minute walk around the corner at Fierman, including artists such as Montrel Beverly (whose work impressed me at the latest edition of the Outsider Art Fair in New York), Chantel Donwell, Taneya Lovelace, and William Scott.

The gallery’s opening comes at a particularly precarious moment for these art studios, the dealers pointed out, since many of them are funded by Medicaid, which is undergoing harsh cuts as part of the “Big Beautiful Bill” which was signed into law on the Fourth of July. Especially in this moment, said Fierman, they want to train a spotlight on this special kind of “socially integrated art-making.”

In this corner of the art world, said Fierman, “There’s an urgency that’s maybe not felt in other areas of the contemporary art world. There’s an exuberance, a freedom of expression, and there’s something appealing about work that is not made self-consciously for the market, but maybe for other reasons.”

Collectors also feel good, said Cohen, about the fact that their dollars will go “to support people who might be in a rough place.” With artists who work in disability studios, a compelling story often comes together with an accessible price point, she noted.

They’ve already road-tested the idea with a booth for Open Studio at the 2025 NADA New York fair. Cohen said that even people who came into the booth saying they weren’t buying sometimes left having made a purchase. 

What’s more, the gallery builds on the success of the Open Invitational, a fair Fierman inaugurated in Miami in December 2024 along with Sunshine State art patron Ross McCalla; at the Invitational, the exhibitors were all progressive art studios. (This specialty distinguishes it from the Outsider Art Fair, where studios exhibit alongside art dealers.) Artnet’s Andrew Russeth dubbed it “a stunner, the quiet hit of the week.” It featured just 11 exhibitors, including the Center for Creative Works in Philadelphia, Creative Growth in Oakland, California, and Vinfen’s Gateway Arts in Boston. 

The Miami Design District offered a venue at no charge, and the exhibitors paid nothing for the booths. “We had a beautiful space, and a lot of people came and saw it, the exhibitors had a real boost in visibility from it, and a lot of people sold a lot of work,” said Fierman. He’s cooking up a return edition of the fair for the next Miami art week as well as possible additional Open Invitationals in other cities.

Open Studios joins other New York galleries specializing in this material, from longstanding dealers like Ricco/Maresca and Van Der Plas to newer ones like Shrine, which shows contemporary artists both trained and not. Cohen and Fierman are committed to the field; he is a supporter of the Living Museum at Creedmoor and hosted a show of its artists this past winter, and she penned the 2017 book Outsider Art and Art Therapy: Shared Histories, Current Issues and Future Identities.Cohen previously worked with Brooklyn’s LAND (League Artist Natural Design), which provides studio space and a gallery for artists with disabilities; she describes its work as “teaching life skills through the modality of art.”

They acknowledge that they’re bringing a new gallery into the world at a moment of a weakening art market, but, says Cohen, “It’s a mode of art-making that is a little more recession-proof than the wider contemporary art field.”

“John Tursi: Lozenges” will be at Open Studio, 127 Henry Street, and “Introducing Open Studio: New Art by Artists with Disabilities” will be at Fierman, 19 Pike Street, New York, July 10–August 9, 2025.