Thirty-four-year-old Rule Gallery temporarily steps outside its white walls, presenting site-specific, time-based art experiences in the Denver area.
DENVER—Valerie Santerli is questioning a 100-year-old precedent for art viewership: the white cube. And when Santerli, co-owner and director of Denver and Marfa’s Rule Gallery, has a question, her energy tends to rise and expand until an answer emerges. Which is why when she and co-owner Rachel Beitz found themselves up against yet another move in Denver this spring—their fifth since taking ownership of the contemporary gallery in 2013—rather than look for a new set of white walls, they decided to remove them entirely.
“Many galleries are transitioning out of their spaces because they can’t survive, and I feel really fortunate to say that’s not the case for us,” says Santerli, explaining that the thirty-four-year-old gallery, founded by the late Robin Rule, is seeing record art sales. When their space at 808 Santa Fe Drive changed ownership in September of 2024, the new landlord was just as supportive as their previous one. “They wanted to see us stay in place, but when the space went on the market,” Santerli explains, “I had a clear sense that this was the door—and it was opening up to growth and opportunity.”
Following their current exhibition, El Disco: Charged Particles in the Vicinity (up through April 19), Rule Denver will de-locate, beginning a six- to nine-month period of dérive that allows them to produce intimate, site-specific, time-based art experiences across the Front Range. To support their administrative work and house their inventory, the gallery will maintain an office at the Fabrica RiNO creative co-working space, where they will exhibit work and host a monthly happy hour. Tradition will prevail at Rule Marfa (as much as is possible in the iconoclastic West Texas art town), where regular exhibitions will continue.
Artist Matt Scobey, who’s shown with the gallery and was an active member of the Denver art scene before moving to Marfa, views Rule’s deeper dive into the current of experimentation as a natural evolution of who they’ve always been.
“For ten years, Rule has been doing a thing that is now popular, by having their Marfa gallery inside a house where they also live, and inviting people into the residential space,” he says. “For me as an artist, their ambitions don’t seem unusual at all.”
Santerli says Rule’s pace has been brisk. “We’re programming six shows at any given time for our Denver and Marfa galleries, and driving 1,500 miles a month between them,” she explains. In order to protect their energy while giving all that’s required for each show, they’ve extended the length of their Denver exhibitions from six weeks to eight. And yet, in order to explore the full range of experimentation they’re after, even more must be adjusted.
“In Denver, we realized that we’re putting a significant amount of resources into a retail space, and, while people are certainly coming in and art is selling, there’s still a large percentage of people who don’t feel comfortable in a gallery setting,” says Santerli.
Santerli and Beitz are running up against a prominent limitation of commercial galleries, where work is presented in a now-traditional container and can’t easily be seen in any context other than art historical. Together with art museums and the internet, today’s main venues for contemporary art are profit-oriented spaces where sight and thought are often prioritized, leading viewers to consume artwork rather than participate in it.
“A lot of us are tired of the old paradigms,” says Scobey. “New York galleries that have been around for decades, like Marlborough, Denny, and JTT, are closing down their brick-and-mortar spaces with the more pointed interest of doing project-based exhibitions. At the same time, I don’t think galleries or museums should be totally walked away from. There’s a time and place for everything.”
Like much of the programing planned for the months to come, the next chapter of Rule is time-based. Santerli and Beitz plan to find their next gallery space in Denver within the year. In the meantime, they’re maintaining their staff and will utilize their temporary office to show inventory and sell work by the artists they represent. “Moving away from our white box, even temporarily, is a risk because the general public might think that we’re shutting down,” says Santerli, “but really what we’re doing is growing and building new and different opportunities. With our cost of business going down significantly, we can invest more directly in artists.”
“With our new model, people will be welcome to come and go as they want, to pause, seek, and discover at their own pace alone or alongside friends,” says Beitz in a press release. The ability to trust and make necessary adjustments has amplified Santerli and Beitz’s belief that creative intuition exists to be followed.
“Our artists and collectors are excited about the idea of something new,” says Santerli, “and a lot of them are proud to be with a gallery that can take risks. Because what’s contemporary art without risk-taking?”
