GREY AREA
Manish Vora and Kyle DeWoody felt a void in the art world and filled it with Grey Area—the artist-designed objects website that opened its first showroom and store space in SoHo last month.
The cofounders had shared backgrounds in art, though rather different ones. Vora left a career in investment banking to launch Artlog, the global contemporary art guide, in 2008 and DeWoody, the daughter of contemporary art collector Beth Rudin DeWoody and the artist Jim DeWoody, had dabbled in design, consulting, curating, and writing. But shortly after their paths crossed one summer, at the annual Watermill Center Benefit, Vora approached DeWoody with an idea for a site to sell artist pieces—wearable, functional, editioned—that lacked a proper platform.
DeWoody calls the rest “kismet.” She happened to be curating a show of artist-designed jewelry at the time and was already in touch with some of her favorite artists. That, coupled with the pair’s tendency toward immediacy, expedited the startup process. And just three months later, the Grey Area website had launched, and its first popup shop followed in the Hamptons last summer.
Grey Area offers artist pieces that range from an Anne Koch silver shrimp ring to a Dustin Yellin chessboard. “His work is very recognizable for contemporary collectors,” Vora says of Yellin, the Brooklyn-based artist who often works with large, layered glass pieces. “So it’s kind unique that for Grey Area, he’s taken his concept and made it into this piece…of art, or is this a chessboard? Or is it both?”
“Both,” responds DeWoody, who is particularly excited about a new piece, Shelter Serra’s fake Rolex, made of platinum silicone. “He had done a hard resin cast of fake a Rolex as a sculpture,” she says. “I saw it and said, ‘Make that so I can wear it.’ And he was cool, and down for it, and spent the past fall figuring out the right material.” They’ve recently arrived in the showroom, in black and white.
Yellin’s chessboard and Serra’s Rolex sit in the space among treasures like E.V. Day’s mummified Barbie dolls, an Art Production Fund Yoshitomo Nara beach towel, Yassi Mazandi’s suggestive orchid sculpture and a Peter Dayton surf table, in the new second floor space of the Grey Area’s showroom and store—a long, open space with tall windows and wooden floors. Beyond its spacious setup and ideal retail location, it also has history. Before it was a dress shop, the space was once the studio for Laurie Smith and Carroll Dunham, sometimes shared by Cindy Sherman, DeWoody says.
The extension of the showroom and office into a retail space follows the co-founding pair’s drive to make art experiential and accessible. They want customers to know the story behind the pieces, to feel connected. When customers buzz into Grey Area off Broadway, the team of three (with associate director Ling Luke plus three interns) walks visitors through the space, sharing objects and stories.
“I think more and more you see a desire for consumers to interact with goods that have a story,” Vora says. “And I don’t think that there is a better storyteller out there than the artist. I think our mission and goal has always been to further their stories, in the functional arena.”
Grey Area is open now at 547 Broadway, second floor.
