Brent Sikkema, influential New York gallery owner, dies at the age of 75

Brent Sikkema, an influential and respected gallery owner from New York City, was found dead on January 15 in an apartment he owned in Rio de Janeiro. He was 75.

Brazilian police said he had apparently been stabbed multiple times and an investigation was underway. A suspect was arrested on Thursday.

As founder of what became the Sikkema Jenkins & Co. gallery in Manhattan's Chelsea arts district, Mr. Sikkema discovered, mentored, exhibited and sold a diverse and remarkably international rotation of leading artists whose work combined bright, accessible color with substantive subject matter as memory. , race and identity.

Sikkema Jenkins has represented artists at every stage of their career Sheila Hicksa long-established pioneer in the field of textile art, to Louis Fratinoa young figurative painter – and in every medium, from the politically inspired sculptor William Cordova to the choreographer's legacy Trisha Brown. Some artists inevitably moved to larger galleries. But a tight core of loyalists, most notably Vik Muniz, Arturo Herrera and Kara Walker, stayed with Sikkema for decades as they built their careers together.

“Brent Sikkema and I had a personal bond that went far beyond that of gallery director and exhibiting artist,” Ms. Walker said in a statement. “He was a nurturing, protective figure for me when I was quite a young starter. He saw something in me beyond what either of us could fully express, but I think we brought out the best in each other.”

Mr. Muniz, a photographer who was born in São Paulo and now has homes in New York and Rio, wrote on Instagram about Mr. Sikkema: “For more than thirty years I have tried pointlessly to emulate his juggling of fearlessness, friendliness and friendliness . and refinement.”

In recent years, Mr. Sikkema has been less involved in the gallery's daily operations, as he has spent more time in Brazil, where he sought a residence permit and where several of his artists lived. But the institution, which he had built based on his own taste and judgment, continued to affect artists such as the painter Brenda Goodmanwho started showing with Sikkema Jenkins in 2019 – but had been striving to do so for years.

“I first moved to New York in 1976,” she said in an interview, and since the moment Sikkema Jenkins opened, “that was my dream gallery.”

Brent Fay Sikkema was born on August 13, 1948 in Morrison, Illinois, the youngest of two children of Dwaine Louis Sikkema and Emily (Howe) Sikkema. For a time, his parents owned and operated a tavern in Morrison.

Mr. Sikkema and his husband, Daniel (Garcia) Sikkema, were in the middle of a divorce. He also leaves behind their son Lucas Sikkema.

Mr. Sikkema received a BFA degree in 1970 and an MFA in 1971 from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied filmmaking and photography. He received grants as a photographer from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1975 and 1979. As late as 1990, when he had a solo exhibition at the Thomas Segal Gallery in Boston, he was still taking photographs himself, using multiple exposures to create black-and-white prints full of art historical references.

But he also began working with the art of others right out of school, as director of traveling exhibitions and then director of exhibitions at the nonprofit Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. In 1976 he moved to the Vision Gallery in Boston, showcasing 19th and 20th century photography and listed many museums among his clientele. In 1980 he became the owner of the gallery.

(He was also briefly married to Vision founder Mary Pratt; that early marriage was the second of two that ended in divorce.)

In 1989 he organized his first show in New York under the name Brent Sikkema Fine Art. Two years later, he opened a permanent space in SoHo that he called Wooster Gardens. There he showed innovative photography and a number of female painters – including Mary Heilmann, Ann Craven and Amy Sillman. In 1995 he gave Kara Walker's provocative black paper silhouettes their first solo show.

Michael Jenkins began working with Mr. Sikkema in 1991 and became official gallery director in 1996 and partner in 2003. Meg Malloy became partner in 2005.

Artists previously represented by the gallery include Ms. Sillman, Mark Bradford, Wangechi Mutu, Deana Lawson and Arlene Shechet.

In 1999, Mr. Sikkema was among the first wave of gallerists to move from SoHo to far west Chelsea, which at the time was still a semi-abandoned industrial neighborhood. There he showed glass sculptures by Josiah McElheny, photographs by Tim Davis and the mystical drawings of the Ivoirian outsider artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré and, as Ken Johnson wrote in a 2000 New York Times review, a group exhibition with Barkley L. Hendricks and Wangechi Mutu expanded his affinity with multiculturalism “not as a bureaucratic program but as a kind of delirious pluralism.”

Jeffrey Gibson, who will become the first indigenous artist to represent the United States at this year's Venice Biennale, joined the gallery in 2018. He also shared a statement in which he reflected on Mr. Sikkema's generosity.

“Brent was an early advocate of many queer art spaces, including Participant Inc., FIAR, and Boffo, among others,” he wrote. “He always took the time to interact with artists, not as a dealer or gallerist, but more as a supportive friend.”