“A Picture, 1000 Words”

An incredible feature of K Art Gallery Owner, David Kimelberg in Lake Affect Magazine’s feature, “A Picture, 1000 Words.”

Interview by Michelle Cardulla & Photograph by Akari Iburi

https://lakeaffectmagazine.com/

David Kimelberg,
K Art Gallery, Owner

I was born in Buffalo. We moved when I was 4 or 5 and I grew up in the Albany area. I moved back here 12 years ago and I wasn’t necessarily expecting to stay, but we did because it’s a fantastic place. Our main law offices are in New York City because all of our clients are there. Pre­-Covid I was down there one week out of the month. But I ha­ven’t been there in forever. The nature of what I do doesn’t require me to be there, so it’s worked out.

My mom is from here originally. Her family is from the Cat­taraugus Reservation. She was a teacher and was actually was one of the founding teachers of the Head Start program on the Cattaraugus Reservation. She was always a teacher. When we moved to Albany she taught middle school. My dad is from London. He moved to Buffalo in his mid-20’s to go to UB. That is how he met my mom. He was getting his PhD in biology. He became a neuroscientist.

My mom was always very active in Seneca matters. My great-great uncle was President of the Seneca Nation in the 60s, which was a big deal in our family. We had a lot of rela­tives out in the Cattaraugus territory that my mom continued to be very close to. We would normally come back most summers for a few weeks and spend time with them. There was a strong connection to the Seneca Nation.

I am a corporate attorney and that is what I have been doing in one capacity or another for the past 20 years or so now. I’ve always done that. I did ii in New York and in Boston for firms and companies and then I got this really interesting opportunity about 13 years ago. I had always done some work for the Nation. They had a lot of new revenue coming in from their gaming enterprises. And they said, “We real­ly need to diversify this because if gaming goes away, it’s all over.” The Seneca Nation, like most Native nations tend to be somewhat suspicious of outsiders for good and bad reasons. They p refer to go with their own before outsiders. They asked themselves. “Who do we know that is a Sene­ca who does something even remotely like this?” And they said, “Dave Kimelberg does.” So someone got in touch with me and asked me, “Hey would you move back to the territo­ry and start this company?” “We’ve allocated some capital and we want to start companies outside gaming.” That was a big decision for me, but I said, “sure.” My family didn’t come initially. My wife was a professor at Northeastern Uni­versity in Boston. So I came out for a year and lived out on the Allegany territory for six months and just flew back home on the weekends. I was the first employee. The first project, I’ll never forget this was, nobody told me this until I got there. They said, “Hey, just so you know, the Seneca Nation bought an FM radio license two years ago and we want you to set up a commercial FM radio station. I almost (laughs) moved back. I thought, this is nuts. But I said, “OK I’m game.” We found a building in Salamanca and set up a commercial FM Radio station. It was sort of a hybrid. It had some native content, but it had to stand on its own so it had to have commercial radio. We hired a bunch of people and figured out how to run a radio station. Sadly it is going off the air this year, but it has been on the air for 12 years. Once we got through that we set up a bunch of companies. Fast forward now they probably have 500 employees across the country and internationally- it’s doing very, very well. I re­ tired from the CEO position about 3 years ago just because, honestly, they didn’t need me anymore full time, and there are other things I want to do like this [K Art]. I am still on the Board. That’s how I came back to Buffalo and stayed.

Clearly there’s a lot that goes on in this building, but a big component is the art gallery. It’s a commercial art gallery­ it’s unique in the sense that we’re focused on Native con­ temporary artists, which no one else does, exclusively. The idea is to bring that genre of art, and more important­ly, the artists, into the mainstream, into the art world. Be­ cause there are tons of gatekeepers. We also want to have a component that is non-commercial so we are setting up a non-profit now and we are going to use those funds to create a platform for that type of work- more educational in Native arts and culture.

So you have the general art market, modern contemporary art market. You have the blue chip galleries in New York and major cities where the art directors decide what gets seen and what doesn’t get seen and then you have the auc­tion houses and then you have the museums. They control what makes it in the general art market. Most importantly the collectors, they can make an artist’s career. So Native contemporary art is sometimes on the fringes of that but their work hasn’t been generally promoted as really import­ ant contemporary art. I think there has been a movement over the past 10 years for underrepresented artists. I know contemporary African American artists have really seen an uptick in the past few years as having a moment where their art is recognized as being really important and great art. My long term goal is to see contemporary Native artists on that same trajectory and be recognized as really important, great artists on their own. We are not going to do that on our own, but we want to raise their pro files and help do that.