For The CAMP Gallery, the practice of gallery keeping is not only an aesthetic or commercial project, but a collective one. Built out of a refusal of isolation, and a belief that access is not a secondary concern but the condition under which art can actually function, founder Melanie Prapopoulos makes it her mission to bring intertextual work and performance into an inclusive space.
The gallery formed out of the organic collaboration between Prapopoulos and other artists for whom she organized site-specific pop-up shows, creating its foundation during Covid. Refusing to let the pandemic decimate the relationships between artists and their audiences, Prapopoulos’s impulse was to digitize existing slotted exhibitions, moving them into the only viable landscape of the time.
“There were so many artists who had their exhibitions canceled, and I didn't want them to be left miserable in the middle of their creativity,” Prapopoulos explains. “I had a gallery space in Miami, but because of the lockdown nobody was going. We still held a couple of exhibitions in that space just so the artists could still have their exhibitions going, but we hosted a lot of artists online. It's only grown from there. Now that we have physical space, we do exhibitions, we do art fairs, we do online exhibitions.”
Prapopoulos’s working life began in the garment district in New York in the early 1980s, gaining business experience and connections. By 2000, she continued to find obvious holes in the gallery system. “I came across so many different vanity galleries and scams,” she says. “Artists I knew told me stories about how they never got their artwork back and other horrible experiences. I thought I would like to do something better, to help out artists and surround myself in art.”
Her approach has been interdisciplinary from the start, often focusing on the hybridization of arts with other mediums in order to expand a viewer’s potential interests.
“My studies at NYU and my master's at the University of Indianapolis were both in literature with a minor in art history,” she says. “My undergraduate thesis was on Gabriel García Márquez in relation to different Latin American artists and how one could understand them as individual arts or in tandem. When I did my master's, it focused on the Harlem Renaissance, taking poetry, and painting and connecting the two. One of the things that became so apparent during my studies is that everything is so interconnected. When you look at, let's say, literary modernism, you find the same elements happening in the physical arts, in the plastic arts and the performing arts. You find it in philosophy, sociology, psychology, they're all interconnected. Why do we have to keep dividing these lines? I think one of the problems in the art world is it's still very often an exclusive club where not everybody understands what's going on. I think bringing in the other disciplines helps people gain access to the work.”