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Jack the Pelican

Jack the Pelican Presents is a contemporary art gallery that flourished in Brooklyn, New York in the first decade of the millennia. Almost from the beginning the gallery became as simply “Jack the Pelican.”



Founded in 2002 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by close friends Donald Eoin Carroll (Don) and Matthew Zalla (Matt), the gallery was an integral part of the “Williamsburg Scene,” producing over 200 exhibitions, a number of which were seminal. Shows were often popular. Many received international critical attention. Some stirred controversy. In general, the gallery’s reputation was notorious.

Popular shows and artists included:

David Shapiro's "Consumed"

Gil and Moti's "Sleeping with the Enemy"

Peter Caine

Larissa Sanssour

Jillian Mcdonald

The Icelandic Love Corporation

Guerra de la Paz

Michelle Handelman

Jerry Kearns

Robin Williams

Jerry Bercowetz & Matt Bua

"The Brooklyn is Watching" project by Jay van Buren

"Knock Knock Picnic"

"Squint"

Gallery Prehistory

Zalla had been a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Columbia University. He left in 2002 to start a construction contracting business, because “he hates writing papers” and to found the gallery. Carroll got an MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art in 1991. By 2002, he had been a longtime artist, curator, critic, and arts administrator best known at that time as the founding Editor-in-Chief (and cofounder in 1993, with Wade Chandler) of the seminal non-profit magazine Art Lies, while he was a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In New York, he had briefly served as the director of Art Moving, Aron Namenwirth’s early gallery on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, before becoming the last Executive Director of the Tribeca struggling emerging artist “guerrilla exhibition” collective Art Initiatives, which he merged with its umbrella organization The Art Information Center, an artist-resource service founded by Betty Chamberlain (1908–1983) in 1959 and run by Dan Concholar (1939–2017) since the 1980s. Notably, Carroll had used this post to champion and advocate for the Williamsburg art community, then in its Golden Age and as yet largely unhailed.

Carroll Goes It Alone (2006–)

Matt Zalla left the gallery in the wake of Grendel, the alternative art fair he spearheaded during Miami Art Basel for Jack the Pelican in 2006 and produced in partnership with Rupert Ravens and Dam Stuhltrager galleries). Although critically well received, the show was poorly attended. In Zalla’s words, “I break my butt to help everyone and no one gives a damn.”

Early Struggles (2002–2007)

The gallery was popular among artists since its beginning. Its openings were typically massive. It also gained much attention from the art press in these early years. Collectors, however, were harder to convince. Williamsburg was still perceived as an upstart flash-in-the pan. With notable exceptions, few serious collectors dared venture over into Brooklyn — and would only get to know it galleries at international art fairs. For Jack the Pelican, like many of its peer galleries in Brooklyn, “art fairs became hit-or-miss gambles that either put you in the black or sank you.” The gallery “paid to play,” Sales never kept up with expenses. The gallery was bankrolled in this period largely by Don Carroll, through his earnings as a writer for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and copywriter/director for Tiffany & Co., Bergdorf Goodman, and Bloomingdale’s. Additionally, the gallery was undermined on the inside by an embezzler.

In the Black (2007–2009)

Eva Frosch joined the gallery as director in 2007. An art historian from Zurich, Switzerland, the former emergency room nurse and assistant to Peer Halley “managed the mayhem with kid gloves and an iron fist,” for the first time putting the gallery on firm financial footing. The gallery had waiting lists for several of its stars, most notably the painter Robin Williams.

Impact of The Great Recession

Carroll, interviewed in 2008 by NPR about the impact of economic collapse on the art economy claimed immunity from general hardship. However, all was not rosy. Even collectors who hadn’t been badly hurt considered it in bad taste to make art purchases, which many considered frivolous, at a time when so many were hurting. The gallery sold scarcely a single piece of art from 2009 until 2011 and survived only through the generous support of its only-ever silent backer, Thomas Ritchford (aka Tom Swirly — a musician, cultural impresario, coder genius, and “early Google millionaire”) and Gregory de la Haba, Jack the Pelican’s artist-in residence, whose exhibition “Equs Maximus” occupied its back gallery and offices throughout this period.

Summer 2010: The Gallery Closes Its Doors

Carroll finally made the decision to surrender the space and cease public exhibitions in Spring 2010 at a meeting of gallery supporters. It was generally felt among those present that all hope was indeed lost. Mindful of early peer galleries collapsing under the weight of enormous debts owed to artists, Carroll who had also lost his job as global Copy Director at Bloomingdale’s made the decision “to halt while we are not too far behind.”

The Final Show: The Sacred Comic Book

The gallery closed with a presentation of the forty original watercolor drawings of Charles Sarka’s masterpiece, “Song without Music,” which was completed in 1921 and was arguably the world’s first comic book. This set of drawings discovered by Carroll at Argosy Books in 2000 during his lunch hour, had not yet been identified and he was able to acquire it for a song. Only after getting it home later that night did he realize these were the original works on paper and that it was about the decades-long struggle of an artist and his ne’er do well friends to make it in New York. Only many months of investigating was Carroll able to identify the artist, Charles Sarka and realize had already been celebrated as both one of America’s greatest Golden Age Illustrators and most accomplished watercolorists. Carroll donned it “The Sacred Comic Book” and assigned it as required reading for all his early exhibitors. It became the gallery’s anthem.

Donald Eoin Carroll had always proclaimed he was going to reopen the gallery at another venue. Privately, however, he protested, “Not without a brilliant business plan and lots of money in the bank to ensure a decent cash flow keep the electricity on and to weather the storms.” Experience had taught him that the prevailing emerging artist gallery business model was not viable. Public perception was that he had just said good riddance to the art world, turned his back and walked away. For the last decade, Carroll has intermittently continued to work in the art world behind the scenes — as the interim editor, for example, of Sotheby’s Preferred Magazine and as a private dealer.

The Phoenix Rises

In 2020, Carroll reorganized under the LLC Verity Loves Charity. Part of this new enterprise involves re-launching the gallery as a next-generation digital/IRL hybrid. A brick and mortar space is planned for the Bed-Stuy neighborhood in Brooklyn as well as an independent pop-up strategy for art events worldwide. This entity is filed under the DBA “Jack the Pelican 2 Dedicated to the Memory of Joe Heaps Nelson.”

Gallery Name, Trademark, and Controversy The gallery’s name "Jack the Pelican" is a mondegreen of “Jackson Pollock,” Carroll misheard at a bachelor’s party at Kauai Hawaii Golf Club in 2000. Before becoming the gallery’s name, he had adopted it as his ex libris. He first used it publicly as a pseudonym for his curation of his controversial “Man Ray Photograph” in 2001 at the Lazy J Ranch gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Carroll was discouraged from using his own name by the Chelseas gallery then representing him. Later, when he worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, he had to formally agree that his own name would never appear in the press. However, it was intended as a gallery name rather than his pseudonym. However, when Carroll tried to register a new LLC in 2020, the Secretary of State of New York required him to finally acknowledge the name “Jack the Pelican” as his own legal alias.

In 2010, a Chinese company astroturfed the gallery's URL to take advantage of lucrative inbound traffic from links in the press. It has since been sold and resold several times. Currently there is a petition with ICANN to return control of the URL to its original owner, Don Carroll.