In art dealer David Leonardis’s eyes, the difference between New York and Chicago is that you get to take your asking price and “add a zero.” So in January, after ten years in business, Leonardis decided to close his Wicker Park space and head east. In February he put a Going Out of Business sign in his window and had a clearance sale–100 pieces priced at $100. Then he made sales 30 days in a row, and a new sign went up: “Staying in Business! Thanks for your support Chicago. Come on in and buy some art!”
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Leonardis opened his namesake gallery in April 1992, after a year and a half selling various articles out of his apartment and from a booth on Belmont near Racine. The gallery was originally at 1352 N. Paulina, but in July 2000 he bought the two-story building at 1346 N. Paulina and moved it to the first floor and his residence to the second. That year turned out to be his best ever for sales, but it closed on a sour note with his worst-ever November and December–traditionally his most profitable time. He points the finger at the Bush-Gore election debacle. “If you think people are worried about spending their money during times of war, forget about it when they don’t know who’s going to be in control of the country.”
Leonardis has featured quite a few Chicago artists in his time, but he also scouts for talent elsewhere. A good portion of the work he shows tends to be of the outsider and self-taught variety–paintings of superheroes, colored-pencil sketches of pictures in magazines–and starts at the $100 mark. But ever the salesman, Leonardis says if “you bring the big checkbook we have a few $10,000 items for you.” One artist he peddles hard is the late Reverend Howard Finster. Leonardis first approached Finster more than a decade ago. “I told him I was a fan and that I wanted to make T-shirts. We agreed on an image, and then when I made my first run he traded me art for T-shirts. He told me that if anyone got saved because of one of my T-shirts, I would get extra-credit points in heaven.”
Indeed, despite the “incredible show of support” he received in February, Leonardis sounds slightly ambivalent about his space here. “It’s like I put up my ‘Yeah-I’m-staying-in-business-sale’ sign, and I am staying in business. But we’ll see how it goes.”
