Mary Gail Doerhoefer was raised on a small farm in Prospect, Ky. “We had horses, gardens, a tractor, and we were surrounded by farms,” she said during a conversation at LongHouse Reserve, where she is head of collections and exhibitions. “I was out in nature all the time, which is part of the energy that got me to LongHouse.”
The road to the 16-acre East Hampton sculpture garden, however, wound for almost 40 years through art galleries in Atlanta and New York City. Her exposure to art had its roots in Prospect, where both of her parents were creative. Her father was a geologist who not only enrolled her in art classes but also took her on trips to see architecture.
One of those was to Columbus, Ind., where in the mid-1950s J. Irwin Miller, a wealthy businessman, set up an endowment fund to pay the design fees for notable architects, who were in turn hired to design the small city’s public buildings. Among the dozens of boldfaced architectural names thus engaged were I.M. Pei, Eero Saarinen, Kevin Roche, Richard Meier, and Robert Venturi. “That’s probably what started my interest in the modernist era,” Ms. Doerhoefer said.
When she enrolled in Emory University in Atlanta in 1982, she wasn’t thinking about modernist architecture or art. Because she excelled in math, she decided to major in math and computers, but she found Trig 5 boring, and spending hours alone in the computer lab trying to move the cursor from here to there less than exciting. She switched to art history.
“Emory had a beautiful art history program and a really sweet museum on campus. Not contemporary; it was Greek and Roman.” The director was Maxwell Anderson, who later became the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and has remained a close friend.
“I had so much fun going to the big art history lectures, and that’s when I was first introduced to Rothko. Once I started seeing that, I was melting.” But she wasn’t thinking about a career in art. As a junior, her art history adviser suggested she intern at an art gallery instead of taking another class. “I was so naive about the whole thing, I didn’t know anything about the art world or the art market. I didn’t even know there was one.”
That is, until she began her internship at the Fay Gold Gallery in 1985, while still at Emory. “Fay is in her 90s, and she’s still active in the art world. She was the best mentor ever and I really consider her family.” Ms. Gold would have preferred her gallery to be in New York, but her husband’s business was based in Atlanta.
“So she did the next best thing. She opened her gallery in Atlanta and brought all the New York artists there.” On her first day at the gallery, Ms. Doerhoefer was tasked with sitting at a table next to an artist who would be signing copies of his new book.
“The artist was Robert Mapplethorpe, who was brought down from the Robert Miller Gallery, with which Fay had a close relationship. I didn’t have any idea about Robert, but I learned very quickly. He was so sweet.” Another artist Ms. Gold was close to was Jean-Michel Basquiat. She was one of his first dealers, and they became so close that when he died she inherited his cat.
Because Ms. Gold admired the Robert Miller Gallery, she showed many of its artists. Ms. Doerhoefer also met Howard Read, who was the director of the photography department at the New York gallery.
“After almost four years, I told Fay I had to move to New York and work for the Robert Miller Gallery.”
Even though she had never even been to New York, she began sending her resumé to galleries there. She enrolled in the arts administration program at New York University, thinking she would take classes at night and answer phones at a gallery during the day.It didn’t quite happen that way. First of all, while still in Atlanta, Larry Gagosian invited her to New York for an interview and hired her — “on the spot” — to be his first female salesperson. But, before she even moved to New York, her dream was the Robert Miller Gallery, so she went there and met with Mr. Read. Soon, his longtime assistant left and Ms. Doerhoefer was offered the job of associate director of photography.
“Bob Miller was amazing, there was so much integrity going through that gallery. And the stable of artists was incredible.” The museum-quality photography department represented William Eggleston, Mapplethorpe, and the Diane Arbus estate, among others, as well as such icons as Stieglitz, Steichen, and Man Ray. That was where Ms. Doerhoefer first became involved with representing artists’ estates.
After almost seven years there, the gallery started to change. While Mr. Read led the photography department, John Cheim was the director of the painting and sculpture department. The two men had been friends at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Mr. Cheim and Mr. Read decided they wanted to open their own gallery and asked Ms. Doerhoefer to be a minority partner. “So we all left in 1996 and opened Cheim & Read on 23rd Street in Chelsea,” Ms. Doerhoefer said. “It was so exciting because we didn’t know what it was going to be like or how we would do.”
The gallery’s first exhibition was one of Louise Bourgeois’s big spiders, which barely fit into the gallery space, and an installation of plaques by Jenny Holzer. “So we started off at the top. We were so lucky with that.”
But it wasn’t really luck. Among the other artists who joined them were Louise Fishman, the estate of Joan Mitchell, and Mr. Eggleston, and the stable included Lynda Benglis, Alice Neel, Sean Scully, and Mapplethorpe.
“We were all so grateful for the way Robert Miller ran his gallery, and it had a deep effect on us. There was so much appreciation and honoring of the relationships with the artists and the art itself, and, of course, the collectors. We really nurtured our collectors and our artists.” After a couple of years, the gallery bought a former taxi garage on 25th Street that the partners designed with the architect Richard Gluckman.
By 2018, after a 22-year run, Mr. Cheim and Mr. Read decided they wanted to change the business and close the main exhibition program. She helped them with this transition before leaving the gallery in 2020.
“I had been working in the art world nonstop since I was a junior in college. I needed a breather while I tried to figure out what I was going to do next. And that’s when I started getting this strong pull to somehow combine art and nature.” The one thing she was certain of was that she wanted to leave the city.
She began to look casually for places to live within two hours of New York, where her daughter, who had graduated from N.Y.U., was working in the music business. She put her TriBeCa condo on the market so that she would be forced to go for it and relocate.
“I always loved LongHouse,” she said. “Its website had a very thoughtful link to sign up for job alerts,” and after a couple of months she had an email saying they had an entry level administrative job. “I thought I’d probably have to answer the phones — but it was LongHouse!”
After several interviews, she joined the staff in January 2024. Before long she was working with the art alongside Carrie Rebora Barratt, the director, and others, and her title changed from assistant to head of collections and exhibitions. “I am so grateful to be at LongHouse doing art in nature.”
She had rented houses in the Hamptons during the summers since she first moved to New York, and she and her ex-husband bought property on Shelter Island and built a house there, which he still owns.
After she said yes to LongHouse, she sold her condo in the city and through a real estate agent friend found a house in Northwest Woods. While she closed on it last summer, she has been doing some renovations and plans to move in in May.
“If you go to the moon and look down, this tiny spot of the world is so dense with culture. It’s amazing what has come out of this area.” And there’s still plenty of nature for someone who once told an interviewer, “I would like to live one day in a peaceful, nature-filled, beautiful place.”
