Founded in New York in 1980 by Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer, Metro Pictures was a gallery with an identity, at the forefront of discovering “The Pictures Generation.” The first generation to grow up with the pop culture of movies and television, popular music, and magazines, this group of artists engaged with the conceptual issues of art making derived from mass media and contemporary society, addressing the real ways images shape our perceptions of ourselves and the world. This movement and the expansion of Metro’s curatorial program defined the New York art scene from the 1980’s to the media-savvy, selfie-loving generation of the 2020’s.

The gallery’s inaugural exhibition featured artists such as Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, James Welling, Richard Prince, and Walter Robinson. Later exhibitions included artists like Mike Kelly, Camille Henrot, Martin Kippenberger and Paulina Olowska. As part of a new wave of women gallerists, Helene and Janelle helped promote women artists as much as men, paving the way to a more inclusive art world.

Pictures of Pictures: The Metro Years, which began filming in 2021, explores the unique relationships these trailblazing women art dealers had to their artists, collectors, and the museums and other galleries they worked with to establish their program as prescient, and Metro Pictures as a preeminent force in contemporary art for over 40 years. With extensive interviews filmed since the gallery’s closure, intercut with archival footage, this documentary will stand as a testament to the gallery’s enduring legacy and its profound impact on the art world, and will shed light on the nebulous factors that contributed to the gallery’s seemingly untimely exit from the contemporary art landscape it helped define. Your tax-deductible contribution is vital in order to bring this important film to audiences worldwide.