Photo: Dina Litovsky for New York Magazine

In the elevator of the uptown gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan, which is cramped with staff, an art handler issues a sheepish but firm warning to the art dealer Mary Boone: “There’s a Warhol behind you.” He motions everyone to move gingerly to protect the painting. British New Wave plays from a speaker in the corner, intended to transport visitors to the era of the retrospective opening here in just 48 hours: “Downtown/Uptown,” a show about the spark of the New York art scene in the ’80s, with pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ross Bleckner, Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Warhol — plenty of Warhol — and more across two floors of Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s Beaux-Arts townhouse.

“I seldom did installations that have so many works,” Boone says. “It’s so full. It’s over the top.” Boone, 73, at just about five feet tall with pin-straight black hair, is both physically unassuming and striking — an elegant pairing that has served her well. She ruled the ’80s as a gallerist, elevating artists to a cultural status they’d never before enjoyed, and “Downtown/Uptown” is an implicit celebration of her work. Boone ran her own eponymous spaces both uptown and downtown for a combined 40 years but closed her galleries in 2019 after being sentenced to 30 months in federal prison for tax fraud. The exhibition is her first formal curation since she was released five years ago. “Different galleries have approached me about doing work with them, but it didn’t feel organic or necessary,” she says, taking a seat on the grand marble staircase that ascends the space. She’s wearing a leopard-print Norma Kamali dress she bought in 1981 — a classic bodycon. (She wore it for a shoot with New York in 1982 in an issue that referred to her as both the “new queen of the art scene” and the “queen of the art jungle.”) It still fits perfectly. When the gallery asked her to put this show together in 2023, it felt natural to say “yes.” The explosion of artistic talent and commercial success of the ’80s, Boone tells me, is “something I know.”

In an airy second-floor room featuring one of Warhol’s massive dollar-sign paintings and a double-decker Koons made of vacuum cleaners encased in acrylic, Boone runs into LGD gallerist Brett Gorvy. She listens patiently as he describes the concept. “The notion of ‘Downtown/Uptown,’ for me, was the idea that the scene was downtown. Creativity was there,” he says. “And, actually, the aspiration is to become an uptown person, to go to Warhol’s Factory, hang out there and go to Mr Chow” — the 57th Street restaurant.

“Did we invite Michael Chow to the show?” Boone asks, a bit alarmed that a key player in the scene might have been overlooked. “I would have,” Gorvy says, “but Chow is in L.A.”

Boone came of age in a cohort that worshipped the ’60s — the Pop Art of Warhol and Lichtenstein, the abstractions of Frank Stella. But the ’70s were fallow; observers at the time declared painting was dead. Financially shrewd and willing to nurture the talent of chaotic young personalities, Boone spearheaded the next decade’s revival and was integral in fine art’s transformation into a true commodity.

The task of representing this sublime moment from her past, Boone says, was “something simple.” But “Downtown/Uptown” required serious persuasion and Boone’s connections; she sold many of the displayed works three or four decades ago. Though she describes her memory as “a little slippery,” her instincts remain sharp. On the wall at the top of the gallery’s stairwell hangs an imposing Kruger silkscreen from 1987 with giant red text reading WHAT ME WORRY? Boone originally sold the piece to a billionaire car dealer, who later sold it to a collector in Aspen. When Boone asked to borrow the silkscreen in 2022 for a retrospective of the artist, the collector claimed she had lost it. “How do you lose an eight-by-ten-foot work?” Boone asks. “You don’t.” Boone called around: “She’d sold it to another dealer, and she didn’t want to tell me.” Boone is gleefully anticipating the collector’s arrival at the show.

To gallerygoers, “Downtown/Uptown” may seem like a homecoming for Boone after a catastrophe. But as she tells it, it’s more as if she took a long vacation. According to her, the Feds began investigating her finances in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. They spent ten years, Boone says, “just going through my books and trying to find something on me.” She wonders if she would have been treated differently were she a man. This was also the era of Occupy Wall Street. “I was a woman selling unnecessary, glamorous things to rich people,” Boone says wryly. “What’s not to hate?” The new show would feature a large punching bag, painted by Basquiat decades before her legal troubles, with the name “MARY BOONE.”

At some point during the investigation, Martha Stewart, who served five months in federal prison for obstruction of justice related to an insider-trading case in 2004, caught wind of it. Boone says Stewart told her, “They have people they like to use as examples,” and insisted, “Mary, get a criminal lawyer.” Boone, who seems like a shark one moment and a naïf the next, didn’t listen: “I figured I didn’t do anything criminal. There were a lot of things I didn’t really understand.” She was accused of misrepresenting her personal spending (including $24,380 at beauty salons and nearly $14,000 at Hermès) as business expenses, tallying about $3 million in tax evasion. Boone likes to emphasize that she pleaded guilty and wasn’t convicted in a trial.

In May 2019, she entered a low-security prison in Danbury, Connecticut — where Lauryn Hill and Teresa Giudice have done time — and was released in June 2020, in the thick of COVID lockdowns. The picture the press painted was of a magnificent career gone bust. But in Boone’s view, her scandal was only one piece of a greater changing of the guard: The Metro Pictures gallery closed, Barbara Gladstone died a few years later, and Boone heard rumors of a gallerist with dementia. “It’s life,” she says. “It’s what everybody has to go through.”

As for prison itself, Boone is blithe. “To tell you the truth,” she says, “I got to go to the gym every day. I read a book a day. It was very relaxing. I met some very interesting women that I probably wouldn’t have met otherwise.” It also didn’t really impact her bottom line. She was back to dealmaking soon after and says 2022 was her best year to date, thanks to the pandemic: “People were staying at home looking at their house and thinking, I need something for that wall.”

Back on the second floor, Gorvy says he and Boone have often discussed, “What is the point of doing a show like this? It’s not about going backward in time.” After all, the featured artists — save those who have died — are still showing and selling. “What’s been amazing about this is that the community still exists,” he says. “They’re not necessarily best friends; they’re almost like siblings that come together in a reunion.” What seems to unite them, beyond debut dates, is the fact that they’ve prospered financially. They’ve kept a seat uptown. Their work is so valuable, in fact, that at the opening, each room of the gallery would be manned by a security guard in a suit. Boone and Gorvy insisted that some of the pieces would be for sale. The transaction, they imply, is what shepherds these works into the future. Life will get you, but the art can move in the market.

Boone and Gorvy turn toward a display by Haim Steinbach, a shelf topped with ceramic figurines and a trio of black-and-white cornflakes boxes. It was on sale, likely for five figures. “It really came down to, How do we get an ultimate work?” Gorvy says, “Not something that would just be for exhibition but also that the owner would be willing to sell?”

Boone nods. “Otherwise,” she says, “it’s just a vanity show.”

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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the September 22, 2025, issue of
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