Female Gaze

FEMALE GAZE

GALLERIST

Compelling Art Work

IN NOVEMBER 2017 Lyndsey Ingram ’01

opened her eponymous art gallery on a quiet, cobblestone street in central London. Her shop joins many other galleries in Mayfair, a posh neighborhood and international art hub. From Ingram’s space on Bourdon Street, it’s just a ten-minute walk to Hyde or Green parks. It’s just minutes more to landmarks like Piccadilly Circus and Marble Arch.

Ingram’s gallery fills a converted carriage house, built at the turn of the twentieth century. The 990-square-foot interior rises to a vaulted-glass ceiling, but the two gallery spaces shun the modern “big white box” look of many art shops, says Ingram. “We designed it to be domestic in its feel, where people feel comfortable and enjoy being here,” she says. “We built this from scratch, and we had an opportunity to make it just the way we wanted.”

At thirty-nine, Ingram may seem young to have hung out her own shingle, but she’s been paying dues in the art world since she was a teen. In the summer between her sophomore and junior years, with a grant from the College, Ingram interned in the print department of Sotheby’s in London. The opportunity was invaluable in helping her embark on her chosen path. “I will be eternally grateful to Mount Holyoke for that money,” says Ingram. In turn, she has opened her doors to rising seniors, including Ellie Dolan ’18, who interned with Ingram in the summer of 2017, doing everything from packaging art to social media outreach. “I learned about being in the art world and what it takes—the business ethics behind it—while gathering an appreciation for the art Lyndsey sells,” says Dolan. Ingram’s relentless positivity made an impression on Dolan. “When you love what you do, it makes for a great gallery,” she says. Seeing that passion years ago, Sotheby’s hired Ingram back the summer before her senior year. After graduation she joined Sotheby’s full time for a few years before taking a director position at Sims Reed, a prominent print gallery in London, where she stayed for more than a dozen years.

At Ingram’s new gallery she deals in museum-quality post-war and contemporary prints and works on paper, mainly by British and American artists, including David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, and Bridget Riley. Ingram has cultivated a love of, and expertise in, prints. It’s a powerful medium, she says, and often misunderstood. “People think these are posters or reproductions because of the nature of the way they’re made, and somehow inferior because they’re in multiple,” she says. But they are often an artist’s most compelling original work. “It’s an interesting niche place in the market, because we get to

ABOVE Jane Hammond, Champagne Bucket with Black Fritillaria, Cockscomb and Raffelesia, 2017. 127 cm x 96.5 cm; BELOW Interior of the Lyndsey Ingram Gallery

work with all the best artists, [and] we get to educate people. The price point is more accessible, so you get to see more pictures go home, be in people’s houses and in their lives, and enjoyed,” says Ingram.

In addition to drawing global collectors to her gallery, Ingram travels to art shows internationally and holds a handful of exhibitions per year. This spring, collage artist Jane Hammond ’72 will be showing at Ingram’s gallery. She will offer fourteen complex pieces drawn from several methodologies of printmaking, including hand-painted elements, graphic reproductions, and photographs. Hammond brings them together from a multitude of sources. “The project becomes, ‘Can I get these things to unify to the retina and to sing in a certain way?’” she says. The result is a stunning tapestry of different natural “arrangements” depicted in various vessels, including mosque lamps, champagne buckets, and Japanese ceramic.

Ingram was drawn to Hammond’s work in New York years ago, and it was only later they realized they had Mount Holyoke in common. It’s their second time working together in the past few years, and Hammond, whose work already has graced fifteen European shows, is excited. “Lyndsey has a kind of infectious appreciation of art and a great charismatic—but genuine—ability to communicate to others how much she loves it. When you’re around her, she’s really warm and positive,” Hammond says.

In running a high-end gallery, Ingram draws on her education and experience, even summers spent selling T-shirts on a wharf in Newport, Rhode Island. “There are lots of fundamentals that carry through, and I’m grateful for those jobs I had as a teenager because I do think I learned things that are really still relevant to me now, like a good work ethic, and how to be public-facing,” she says.

Despite the mystique around having a career in the arts, Ingram says it is entirely possible. “You can make a living in this industry just as much as you can anywhere else, but you have to be passionate about it and be prepared to do a lot of grunt work. . . . You just need to work hard and be committed, and there’s every reason to believe you can have a meaningful life and career.”

—BY HEATHER BAUKNEY HANSEN ’94

FEMALE GAZE

BOOKS

The Stendhal Summer

Laurie Levy

AMIKA PRESS In the summer of 1992, public relations writer Alison Miller takes her savings and flies from Chicago to Europe in search of information about Stendhal, the nineteenth-century French author. Traveling to the same cities, walking the same streets, and taking in the same vistas, Miller hopes to write a new biography of Stendhal, with whom she feels a deep affinity. Laurie Glazer Levy ’53 is a Chicago author and journalist, who traveled to research Stendhal’s life thanks to a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Levy has published three books of nonfiction and a short story collection and edited two collections of fiction by Chicago authors. This is her first novel.

Colonized through Art: American Indian Schools and Art Education, 1889–1915

Marinella Lentis

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS Colonized through Art explores how American Indian schools taught children to abandon their cultural heritage and produce artificially “native” crafts that were exhibited at local and international fairs. The purchase of these crafts turned students’ work into commodities and schools into factories. Marinella Lentis MHCG’02 is an independent researcher specializing in historic Native American arts and education. She received her doctorate in American Indian studies from the University of Arizona. She has previously published in American Indian Art Magazine and the Encyclopedia of Politics of the American West. The Milk Lady of Bangalore: An Unexpected Adventure

Shoba Narayan

ALGONQUIN BOOKS In this memoir, Narayan writes of leaving Manhattan and moving back to Bangalore, where she befriends the milk lady. The two women bond over not only cows, considered holy in India, but also family, food, and life. After Narayan agrees to buy her milk lady a new cow, they set off looking for just the right one and what at first was to be a simple economic transaction becomes a much more complicated story.

Shoba Narayanaswamy Narayan

MHCG’87 writes about food, travel, fashion, art, and culture for many publications, including Condé Nast Traveler, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. She writes a weekly column for Mint Lounge, an Indian business daily. Her commentaries have aired on NPR’s All Things Considered. Narayan is the author of Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes, and her essay “The God of Small Feasts” won the James Beard Foundation’s MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award.

WEB EXCLUSIVE See more recent alumnae books at alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/ spring2018books.