The Woman Behind Salon 94’s Move Downtown
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

For about three years, Freeman’s Restaurant, with its charming Provence-style façade, has attracted a bohemian and chic clientele to its improbable location at the end of Freeman Alley, a puddle-ridden passageway in the Lower East Side on Rivington Street whose walls are covered in graffiti.
Now, in anticipation of the December opening of the New Museum around the corner in December, the alley is welcoming a downtown branch of a distinguished uptown gallery that will transform its character.
On Wednesday, the Upper East Side contemporary art gallery Salon 94 opens its first satellite, Salon 94 Freeman’s, under the direction of Swiss-born, 32-year-old Fabienne Stephan.
Ms. Stephan and her gallery will not only change the alley. As the leader of the first downtown outpost of a heavyweight uptown gallery, Ms. Stephan will help set the tone of the transformation of the neighborhood into a destination for contemporary art. She seems well suited for the task.
“She’s just gifted,” the artist Marilyn Minter said Friday from her studio. “There have been so many dealers in my life I had to spell everything out to. She’s somebody who gets it right away, and really helps shape my vision. And she has a sense of how to market me, from which I’ve benefited monetarily.”
She looks right for the part too. “She’s got the most incredible style of anyone I’ve ever seen — and she does it without the bucks. It can be a sweatshirt, a scarf, or a necklace. It’s effortless,” Ms. Minter, who shot the menswear campaigns for designer Tom Ford this season, said.
At the unofficial opening of the gallery on Saturday night, a party for the fashion brand Rodarte, Women’sWearDailyphotographed Ms. Stephan in a black dress with slatted shoulders she bought at a secondhand store for $5.
But substance, not style, is what drives Ms. Stephan. “I try to never put precedence for ideas over aesthetics. It’s really something that goes hand in hand: it cannot be something that sounds good and is conceptually good. The actual visual is really important,” she said in her heavy European accent. (French is her native language; she also speaks English, Italian, and German.)
Ms. Stephan lives in Brooklyn Heights with her husband, an artist. She grew up in a medieval town, Fribourg, Switzerland, with artists and art all around: her father and grandfather are collectors of local artists.
“I would not have imagined working in any other field. I want to be of service to artists to help them create their vision,” Ms. Stephan said.
Ms. Stephan received her undergraduate degree from the University of Geneva and a master’s from the University of Manchester in Britain. She worked at the Neue Kunst Halle St. Gallen in Zurich before coming to New York in 2003 to work for the video and media curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Barbara London.
“Fabienne is very tenacious in pursuing ideas, and very good talking about them. She has quick responses but she is also rational and thoughtful. She puts people at ease,” Ms. London said.
A year and a half ago, the founder and owner of Salon 94 on the Upper East Side, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, hired her as a director. “She has a natural eye. She can pick out the best picture in the room, and she sees where there’s weakness,” Ms. Rohatyn said.
Ms. Rohatyn also liked Ms. Stephan’s European background. “She has a depth of having looked at art all of her life,” Ms. Rohatyn said. “That gives her references that some people who are trained here in America just don’t have.” Even though she came with a curatorial background, she adapted to the commercial aspects of a gallery quickly, developing rapport with collectors.
“I appreciate her broad interest in the contemporary art landscape, not just the gallery’s artists. She has a wide-ranging intellectual approach,” collector Gregory Miller, the president of White Columns and an investment banker, said.
The gallery’s inaugural show features three works by Pakistani sculptor Huma Bhabha, humanlike forms made of clay, chicken wire, Styrofoam, and items from junkyards. Next will be video artist Aïda Ruilova, who won the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize last year, and photographer Katy Grannan.
“I love the fact that most of our program consists of women with totally different visions and ideas,” Ms. Stephan said.
Her own goals for the downtown space are plain enough: “The idea to move downtown came from the need to bring exposure to young artists,” Ms. Stephan said. “We want to show artists where they live and where people will come to see them,” she said.
Ms. Grannan and Ms. Ruilova like the idea of showing their art downtown. “A weird little alley off the Bowery feels right for my work,” Ms. Ruilova said.
“It just feels right to show work in a neighborhood I love. I don’t feel like I’m visiting,” Ms. Grannan, who lives in San Francisco, said.
Architect Rafael Vinoly designed both the uptown and downtown galleries. The downtown space is intimate and historic, with the original rusted steel columns and worn, exposed wooden beams.
The entranceway is the most radical makeover: a pair of tall glass doors with purple handles against concrete, graffiti-covered walls that the gallery has no plans to remove.