Triple Candie received its business license on September 12, 2001 -- the day after the attacks on the World Trade Center. It opened its doors to the public on December 15, 2001, joining Christian Hayes' The Project as one of the few art spaces in Harlem and becoming the first new, large-scale space in the neighborhood since the Studio Museum in Harlem was founded in 1969. From the outside, its building -- a former brewery, with few windows -- looked abandoned. Visitors entered through a grey garage door, ascended a short flight of wooden stairs, and emerged into a brighly lit, 5,000 sq. ft. gallery with soaring cast-iron columns, weathered brick walls, and an expansive, off-white, painted concrete floor. For many, the interior was reminiscent of Soho alternative spaces of the 1970s.

Presenting Not Producing, 2001-2002

Triple Candie was conceived -- before 9/11 -- as a presenting rather than a producing venue. The idea was that the gallery would curate none of its own shows. Instead, it would invite outside organizations (primarily nonprofits, but occasionally commercial galleries) to produce or curate exhibitions for its facility, which Triple Candie would then promote, staff, and organize programs around. The post-9/11 recession made such a strategy untenable. In fact, a month before Triple Candie was to open with a performance-installation by Josiah McElheny, the Public Art Fund, which was producing it, canceled the show citing economic distress. Triple Candie opened nontheless, with two projects by outside organizations -- The Jacob Lawrence Foundation hired Franklin Sirmans to curate an exhibition and Pace Wildenstein Gallery organized a show by Kiki Smith. The strategy was abandoned after the second exhibition.

The Early Inter-generational Group Shows, 2002-2004

For the next two years, Triple Candie curated and presented group exhibitions inspired by its Harlem location that mixed the work of emerging and established artists. This ran counter to the prevailing tendency among nonprofit spaces of the time to promote the work of young artists. These exhibitions included "Sugar & Cream: Large, Contemporary Wall Hangings" (including work by Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jim Hodges, Rosie Le Tompkins, and others), "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (After Paul Laurence Dunbar)" (including videos by Vito Acconci, Chris Marker, and Sara Sun), "The Reality of Things" (Robert Gober, Daniel Guzman, Sherrie Levine, Shinique Smith, et al), and "Living Units" (Ricco Gatson, Jessica Stockholder, Andrea Zittel, others). Though many of these shows required colloboration with commercial galleries and other nonprofits, Triple Candie began maintaining an arm's length connection to its colleagues. Triple Candie was a founding member of NADA (the New Art Dealers Alliance) , in 2002, for example, but withdrew its membership within a year when it found the organization's non-competitive and non-commercial rhetoric disengenuous.

Solo Projects, 2004-2005

As Triple Candie increasingly saw other New York-based, nonprofit "alternative" spaces (Artists Space, White Columns) abandon their age-old focus on emerging artists, it changed its programming model again. For the next two years, the gallery focused almost exclusively on producing ambitious solo projects -- often New York-debuts. These included projects with Sanford Biggers, Taylor Davis, Rashawn Griffin, David Humphrey, Brian Jungen, Mark Lewis, Rodney McMillian, Halsey Rodman, Lara Schnitger, Kiki Smith, Jennifer Stillwell, Heeseop Yoon, and others. It also presented a fifteen-year survey of the work of the influential Cal Arts professor Charles Gaines, for which it commissioned a major new, large-scale sculpture. When it could, Triple Candie provided the artists with stipends (up to $10,000), volunteer assistants, and as much as five weeks for installation.

Slide Shows, 2002-2005

During these first four years, Triple Candie also curated an annual series of artist talks (collectively titled "Slide Shows" and presented as exhibitions) that explored the various forms of rhetoric artists use to describe their practices. Participating artists included Laylah Ali, Tony Feher, Jon Kessler, Dana Schutz, James Siena, Amy Sillman, Phoebe Washburn, Kehinde Wiley, and others.

The Anonymous Artist Projects, 2004-2005

In the summer of 2004, and again the following summer, Triple Candie produced The Anonymous Artist Project I and The Anonymous Project II. For each exhibition, Triple Candie invited a well known New York artist to create a new work/installation that differed substantially from her/his other work, with the understanding that both the artist and Triple Candie would rigorously guard the artists' identities in perpetuity. For artists, the shows provided a risk-free opportunity to experiment, on a large-scale, in a beautiful space. For visitors, however, they prompted an understandable frustration; many felt unable to judge the work without information about the artists' backgrounds, though most assumed that the artists were of African descent, given the gallery's location. Visiting the second project, Philippe Vergne, then still at the Walker Art Center, noted: "Either the artist is highly accomplished or completely naive. I can't tell." Since then, other organizations have curated anonymous artist projects -- i.e. Vienna Succession (2007) -- but in most, if not all, cases the condition of artistic anonymity has been breached at the end of the show. The two artists who did these projects at Triple Candie remain, to this day, unknown.

Art-less Exhibitions, late 2005 - 2008

In late 2005, with the art market booming, Triple Candie started finding that it was having an increasingly difficult time competing with commercial galleries and museums for artists time and attention. Responding to its institutional limitations (i.e. a relative lack of power, money, and social connections) and inability to lure artists simply with its gorgeous space, Triple Candie developed a program model that wasn't dependent on artists or their galleries. It began producing exhibitions about art without the involvement of artists, and rarely containing art.

The first of these shows was a comprehensive retrospective on the art of David Hammons, realized with photocopies and computer print-outs and without the artist's approval (David Hammons: The Unauthorized Retrospective). Though the exhibition was described as "arrogant" by a critic who visited it on assignment and then refused to write about it (David Cohen, The New York Observer), it received positve reviews in the New York Times, and just about every art magazine. David Hammons himself never came to see it in person. on the morning of the first day of the show, howeever, upon opening the gallery, staff members found a clown, bean-bag toss game board leaning against the front door. When later asked by the New York Times for a response to the exhibition, Hammons replyed by email "no comment."

Triple Candie's second art-less show was conceived at the same time as the Hammons show but realized several months later. The first survey ever of Cady Noland's art, it consisted of thirteen sculptural surrogates built by Triple Candie and four artists using incomplete information gleaned from the internet (Cady Noland Approximately: Sculptures and Editions, 1984-2000). All of the objects were therefore wrong, and the show as a whole presented a plausible charicature of an oeuvre. The press response to this show contrasted sharply with that of the Hammons show. Jerry Saltz, then writing for the Village Voice said that Cady Noland should hire a lawyer and "get medieval" on Triple Candie. Others wrote that the show raised interesting questions but told viewers nothing about Cady Noland's art. The artist herself never saw the exhibition.

For the next two and a half years, Triple Candie continued to make exhibitions in this vein. Many were retrospectives or surveys -- such as Lester Hayes: Selected Work, 1962-1975, which focused on the work of a bi-racial post-minimailist artist (the artist was fictional,), and Limelight: Gallery and Coffeehouse, 1954-1961, a retrospective of an art gallery.Other shows focused the misrepresentation of art by art museums -- such as Undoing the Ongoing Bastardization of the Migration of the Negro by Jacob Lawrence and Flip Viola and the Blurs (Misrepresenting an artwork can create a non-art experience of comparable value). Still others presented objects scrounged from Harlem neighbors or the streets outside the gallery -- Unwitting Accomplices: 36 Objects Thrown in Violent Incidents and The Social History of Objects (After Spoerri and Nabokov).

Nine-Month Displacement, 2008-2009

In December 2007, Triple Candie's landlord began extensive renovations of its building, beginning with the replacement of its facade. When noise, construction dust, and flooding made it impossible to program, Triple Candie exercised a 3-month escape clause in its newly negotiated five-year lease. Its parting show was an exhibition titled Thank You For Coming: Triple Candie, 2001-2008, a survey of the gallery's first seven years, realized entirely through surrogates, reproductions, recreations, artifacts, and props. The New York Times cited Triple Candie's closing as one of the most significant "art" events of the year, along with the Philippe de Montebello's retirement and the explosion of the Chinese contemorary art market.

Triple Candie vacated its facility on May 1, 2008 not knowing if it would reopen again. Five months later, restless to continue experimenting with its newly developed exhibition model, Triple Candie signed a lease on a space in a residential neighborhood on Harlem's upper westside and spent more than 1,000 volunteer hours renovating it -- installing a new ceiling, facade, floor, bathroom, lighting, and office area. Triple Candie reopened on February 15, 2009.

Two More Years in Harlem, 2009-2010

During Triple Candie's last two years in Harlem, it presented several dozen exhibitions about art but without it. The shows varied considerably, though often many of the objects that comprised them remained the same. (Objects exhibited at Triple Candie generally have three fates when a show is deinstalled: they are discarded, they were given away to people from the neighborhood, or they are taken apart and their component parts were recycled and used in future exhibitions.) Some of the shows made use, again, of the survey or retrospective trope -- Maurizio Cattelan is Dead: Life & Work, 1960-2009 being the best example. Some were fictious creations, such as The Calais Guild: Prayer Blankets, an exhibition proportedly about the work of a tiny textile group in Southeast Maine, but which was instead a forthright concoction of Triple Candie. And many of the shows either intentionally mis-represented, "improved upon," or commented on existing works by artists such as Lewis Baltz, Dexter Sinister, or Ryan Gander. Triple Candie also curated several shows that were self-referential: The Glass Menagerie (after Tennessee Williams), Two Character Play (after Tennessee Williams), and Beavers as Weavers, and Non-Believers.

Leaving Town

For nine years, Triple Candie operated as a completely volunteer-run enterprise, its board of directors consisting of the two co-directors and a close friend. Funding for the gallery's activities came from outside employment, as well as grants and contributions. Ninety-percent of the budget was used for rent.

On December 31, 2010, desirous of change and cheaper rent, the co-directors of Triple Candie decided to close its Harlem space and leave New York City. They are now in Philadelphia where plans for a new iteration of Triple Candie is in the works.