Ricco/Maresca Gallery

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Ricco/Maresca Gallery For 35+ years, Ricco/Maresca Gallery has specialized in Outsider, Self-Taught, Contemporary, and historically important American Vernacular Art.

Following in the footsteps of the legendary New York dealer Sidney Janis, Ricco/Maresca champions and showcases the art of self-taught masters working outside the continuum of art history. The gallery specializes in Outsider, Self-Taught, Contemporary, and historically significant American Folk art in various media. Over a period of more than 35 years, Ricco/Maresca has helped blur the lines that have habitually separated conventional art-historical categories and “marginal” art. The gallery has carried out this mission through a pioneering program that emphasizes crossover between vernacular and mainstream traditions, the management of key estates (William Hawkins and Martín Ramírez among them), and seminal books produced with publishing partners such as Alfred A. Knopf, Little Brown and Company, and Pomegranate Press. Ricco/Maresca Gallery was founded in 1979 on Broome Street, within New York’s then-emerging SoHo gallery district. The gallery relocated to TriBeCa in the 1980s and later moved to Wooster Street in SoHo—which had by then become an established contemporary art hub. In 1997, Ricco/Maresca became one of the first galleries to move to the new Chelsea art district and is currently located at 529 West 20th Street. The gallery participates and has participated in the Armory Show, the Outsider Art Fair (New York and Paris), Metro Curates, Art Chicago, SCOPE (New York and Miami), and AIPAD. We work closely with major museums and collectors, and offer services that range from curatorial advisory to collection management, installation design, and conservation.

. “We’ve Been Expecting You,” 2026. Acrylic on wood panel. 16 1/2 x 11 3/4 in. (41.9 x 29.8 cm).•••We’re excited to inc...
03/13/2026

. “We’ve Been Expecting You,” 2026. Acrylic on wood panel. 16 1/2 x 11 3/4 in. (41.9 x 29.8 cm).
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We’re excited to include five new works by in Ricco/Maresca’s presentation at the upcoming (March 19 - 22 • Booth B10).
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This painting recasts the clinical ward as a coolly deranged stage set, where nursing becomes a choreography of possession rather than care. The disembodied head, metronomic timepiece, and didactic “Mind” diagram conspire to collapse psychiatry, spiritualism, and domestic ritual into a single, meticulously patterned hallucination, leaving the viewer unsure whether they are witnessing treatment, collusion, or initiation.
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A self-taught painter and psychiatric nurse based in London, Sarah Theresa Lee (b. 1980) conjures domestic interiors that dissolve into unsettling theaters of psychological suspense. Her figures—masked, doubled, or disembodied—hover between mischief and menace, costume and confession. Lee’s motifs accumulate with ritual force, transforming ordinary objects into charged emblems of unease and desire. Drawing on pulp illustration and mid-century horror cinema, she has developed a visual language where the comforts of home slip into surreal ritual and macabre humor. What Big Eyes You Have captures the thrill and dread of looking too closely—paintings that seduce, disturb, and refuse to let the gaze turn away.
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03/07/2026

Thanks to everyone who joined us last Saturday for an unconventional talk led by writer and scholar Matthew Spellberg on the life and work of William Kent. Full recording coming next week.
Today is the last day to see “William Kent (1919 - 2012): Trust the Peeple!”
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02/28/2026

Join us today, Saturday February 28 (4-5pm) for an unconventional talk with writer and scholar Matthew Spellberg. An exploration of the life and work of artist William Kent (1919 - 2012)—at once a passionate American patriot and an otherworldly hermit—who spent fifty years alone in a barn in rural Connecticut producing a vast body of prints and sculptures. Over that half century, Kent articulated—in wood and satin rather than words—a philosophy and a radical politics rooted in a disarming proposition: if we can free manmade objects from man, then they can free us from ourselves.
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02/26/2026

Ricco/Maresca presents The Russi Hive, a new filmed podcast launching on March 5. 🔗 Subscribe everywhere at the link in profile.
Every other week, Alejandra Russi, our Media Director (.Russi), sits down with creators across mediums—and singular minds from unexpected corners—to talk about how ideas arrive, how taste gets trained, how work survives doubt, and what happens in the long middle, when nobody is watching.The set roams throughout the gallery, rebuilding itself each time—an ephemeral architecture—with our exhibitions as a living backdrop. True to Ricco/Maresca’s 40+ year history of championing the overlooked and challenging the usual hierarchies, The Russi Hive follows creativity wherever it shows up: in art, in work, in obsession, and in the way a life is made.
🥂 Special thanks to the teams at for brilliantly bringing the brand identity to life, and to .Music for their luminous interpretation of the podcast’s sonic world.
T-minus 7 days till launch 🚀*�*�*

Address

529 W 20th Street, Fl 3rd
New York, NY
10011

Opening Hours

Tuesday 10am - 6pm
Wednesday 10am - 6pm
Thursday 10am - 6pm
Friday 10am - 6pm
Saturday 11am - 6pm

Telephone

(212) 627-4819

Website

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