Destinee Ross-Sutton on Why the Wrong Gallery Is Worse Than No Gallery

Summary

'State of Art' is a new HypeArt series inviting artists, curators, collectors and other leading voices to weigh in on the ideas, debates and cultural shifts shaping contemporary art. Through intimate questions and personal recommendations, the series offers a closer look at what is exciting the art world, what needs to change and where things may be heading next.

For artists today, visibility no longer depends on being discovered by a gallery. Social media has collapsed many of the barriers that once separated artists from collectors, curators and audiences, while direct sales and self-organized exhibitions have made it increasingly possible to build a career outside the traditional gallery system.

For Destinee Ross-Sutton, that does not mean galleries have become obsolete. It means they have to prove their value. “I don’t think every artist needs a gallery,” the Harlem-born curator and founder of Ross-Sutton Gallery tells Hypeart. “But I do know the right gallery can be an essential partner.”

In the latest edition of ‘State of Art,’ Ross-Sutton considers what representation actually means in 2026, from the shifting power dynamic between artists and dealers to the increasingly contested 50-percent gallery commission.

Social media, she argues, has fundamentally changed the entire landscape. Artists can now introduce their work to thousands of people without waiting for a dealer, critic or curator to grant them access. They can watch their own markets develop in real time, identify collectors and, at a rapid fire pace, sell work directly.

“Galleries are no longer really the gatekeepers” – Destinee Ross-Sutton

But visibility, she stresses, should not be confused with longevity. A serious career requires an infrastructure that extends far beyond finding a buyer. At its best, a gallery provides strategy, trusted relationships, institutional access and an understanding of how decisions made today might affect an artist five or ten years down their career.

“A good gallery is thinking several years ahead,” she explains. “It isn’t simply about where the next work is going to sell. It’s about the best place for the art, which collections it enters, which exhibitions and institutions make sense, how the market develops responsibly and how the artist’s practice is protected as their presence grows.”

That distinction is particularly important as artists reconsider why they should continue surrendering as much as half of a sale to a gallery when they may already have direct access to interested collectors. For Ross-Sutton, the percentage only makes sense when the gallery is doing significantly more than facilitating a transaction. Exhibitions, production, shipping, fairs, press, collector development and museum relationships are all part of the gallery package. The real measure, she says, is not the immediate sale but what that sale helps build around the artist.

Independent careers are increasingly viable as well. But Ross-Sutton points out that many artists operating successfully without conventional representation have effectively constructed galleries of their own, surrounding themselves with studio managers and teams responsible for administration, exhibitions, collectors and institutions.

“Independence doesn’t mean doing everything alone”

The more pressing concern, then, may be what happens when representation becomes transactional rather than developmental. Ross-Sutton distinguishes between galleries that stay committed to an artist through the inevitable fluctuations of a career and those that arrive when demand peaks, capitalize on sales and disappear when momentum slows. For her, representation carries an obligation to understand not only the work, but the person and cultural context behind it.

She recalls a South African artist with an international career spanning nearly three decades who told Ross-Sutton that hers was the first gallery to actually travel to South Africa to meet her and better understand her practice.

“How can you properly advocate for an artist if you haven’t made the effort to understand where the work comes from?”

That philosophy also extends beyond a gallery’s own program. In 2020, Ross-Sutton curated ‘BLACK VOICES/BLACK MICROCOSM’ in Stockholm, bringing together 31 artists from across the Black diaspora and intentionally dissolving distinctions between emerging and established artists, formal and self-taught practices and differing levels of market recognition.

She encountered a recurring problem there, and later while curating ‘Unapologetic WomXn: The Dream Is the Truth’ in Venice: artists who wanted to participate but whose galleries resisted allowing them to do so. The latter exhibition ultimately brought together more than 30 women artists during the 60th Venice Biennale.

For Ross-Sutton, protecting an artist’s career should never become synonymous with controlling it. “There is a difference between representing an artist and possessing an artist,” she says. “Sometimes an opportunity outside your own walls may be exactly what is right for that artist’s career.”

It leads to the question at the center of her argument: “Is the relationship there to serve the artist’s career, or is the artist there to serve the gallery?” If Ross-Sutton were an emerging artist now, representation would still be a goal, but only under the right circumstances. She would want to know whether a gallery understood the work, who its collectors were, what institutional relationships it could offer, whether it welcomed outside opportunities and, crucially, whether it would remain invested when sales were not immediate.

“I would rather have no gallery than the wrong gallery,” she says. “But the right relationship can still be transformative.”