Mission

Studio Vendome's focus is to present exhibitions that are innovative and visually compelling. Our scope encompasses artists of any age — from emerging to mid career to late career, as well as artist estates.

Founder

Antonio “Nino” Vendome is a Manhattan real estate developer whose collaboration with Phillip Johnson in the 1990's introduced him to the art world. Together, they envisioned a seminal building he called The Seasons, which played a key role in the nascent movement of “architecture as sculpture” or “habitable sculpture.” Despite having never been built, owing to community and city resistance, The Seasons has since been recognized as an important progenitor of the sculptural forms found in contemporary architecture. Today the site originally intended for Vendome and Johnson's Habitable Sculpture at 330 Spring Street is now the home to Johnson’s last commissioned building, The Urban Glass House, Johnson's city-life take on his famous Glass House design. Studio Vendome's main gallery is on the ground floor of Johnson's Spring Street building.

However, Antonio is best known for the role he played immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and his community outreach through the summer of 2002. He turned his family restaurant “Nino’s American Kitchen” into a relief center that served hundreds of thousands of free meals twenty-four hours a day to firefighters, police officers, Red Cross workers and others at the World Trade Center site. The story of that community is now being made into a documentary film. Subsequently, Nino donated the memorabilia and contents of his restaurant to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the New York Historical Society and the New York State Museum in order to tell the story of September 11th to future generations.

Antonio's second gallery space, Studio Vendome Projects, is located at 30 Grand Street, directly across the street from The James Hotel. Known as “SVP,” the gallery features small-scale works by select emerging artists.