Draft:Leila Heller

• Comment: Improperly sourced draft, written in a highly promotional tone, does not establish the subject's notability. Netherzone (talk) 22:03, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

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Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller is a New York and Dubai based gallerist, curator, and author, specializing in Contemporary and Modern Masters as well as representing an internationally acclaimed portfolio of emerging, mid-career and renowned artists from around the world. The artists she represents are in the collections of the Guggenheim, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Tate, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, and various foundations. Widely credited for popularizing Middle East born artists in the New York art scene and the Western world at large, Heller is the Founder and President of Leila Heller Gallery, which specializes in representing modern and contemporary artists from the Middle East, as well as from around the globe.

Early life

Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller was born on May 14, 1954 in Tehran, Iran. Her father, born in Samarkand, Russia (now Uzbekistan), eventually fled to Iran after the Bolshevik Revolution. He attended Cornell University and the University of California Los Angeles, after which he moved to New York City. In New York, he began trading textiles, and started a cotton and jute trading business with his brother, who was still in Iran. When he was 32 years old he moved to Iran to marry Heller's mother, Nahid Taghinia-Milani.

Heller's mother was born in Tehran, and was the daughter of Sardar Iqbal al-Saltanah of Maku, a military leader charged with protecting northwestern Azerbaijan from Russia and Turkey. During the reign of Reza Shah, he was summoned to the capital and was a parliamentary minister.

Education

Heller attended Brown University in 1972, initially studying economics, motivated to follow in her father's footsteps and become a powerful business woman. There, she took a class on Impressionism, igniting her passion for art history. She graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor's Degree in art history and French literature. Wanting to eventually return to Iran and work at Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art, Heller continued her education by receiving a Master's of Arts Degree from Sotheby's Institute of Art in London in 1977 and another M.A. in Art History and Museum Management from George Washington University in 1979 – one of the few schools at the time offering a postgraduate degree in museum and curatorial studies. Her final year at George Washington University, Heller worked under curator, Miranda McClintic, at the Hirshhorn Museum for the first-ever retrospective exhibition of David Smith.

Early Career

Heller's final year at George Washington University coincided with the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Her passport was canceled, preventing her from moving back to Iran. She moved to New York City, where her brother was recently admitted to Columbia Business School. There, Heller reconnected with Lisa Dennison, her friend from Brown University. Dennison, who was at that time the assistant to the chief curator at the Guggenheim, Diane Waltman, helped her secure a position in the Development Office of the museum. She eventually joined Dennison in the Curatorial Department, before leaving to work as the in-house curator of an investment bank in New York.

The investment bank sponsored Heller's working visa, and eventually her green card. She learned about publishing and marketing through the bank's acquisition of a French art publication called Connaissance des Art of Paris. Most significantly, her ability to travel allowed her to frequent Paris, visiting galleries and meeting Iranian artists in exile, some of whom she had known in her childhood. She developed a prolific collection of contemporary masters for the Bank for the Securities Group, as well as assisting the owner of the bank with his acquisitions of Old Masters and 19th century works.

Along with her growing experience with all aspects of curation, New York City's artistic scene in the early 1980s encouraged Heller in her professional pursuits. "It was Studio 54 days. The 80s in New York City were fascinating. All the artists were a buzz, Warhol was there, The Factory and all those young great talents," she said in an interview with XBIT Magazine. As a 23 year old, she became friends with artists such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and graffiti artists who frequented Studio 54, Xenon, Area, and the Mudd Club. By visiting their studios, she was inspired to open her own gallery. With the support of the community, Heller opened Leila Taghliania-Milani Gallery on Manhattan's Upper East Side in 1982.

Leila Heller Gallery

Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery, later Leila Heller Gallery, opened in 1982. In 1984, Heller co-curated an exhibition with Jeffrey Deitch called Calligraffiti. The exhibition featured 120 artists, including 60 graffiti artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Etel Adnan, and Hossein Zenderoudi, as well as Lettriste artists from France. More than 3,000 guests attended the exhibition, which explored the gestural brushstroke in artmaking, demonstrating its shared language across both Western and Eastern art. The exhibition also included works by artists like Cy Twombly, Antoni Tàpies, and Georges Mathieu. The catalog for this exhibition is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Following this exhibition, many Middle Eastern artists were drawn to Heller's gallery, leading her to represent a number of them. Heller continued to cultivate a space for Middle Eastern artists in New York throughout the decade that followed. She brought many Middle Eastern artists to the United States and showed their work alongside major primary and secondary international artists, creating a global platform for their work, and selling many to European museums. She mentored talents such as Y.Z. Kami, now a prolific Iranian-American artist. She was the first to put on full-scale art exhibitions in America with works from the Middle East and surrounding regions. After the birth of her first son in 1992, the gallery went private, dealing only in the secondary market. It reopened in 2004, to a vastly different artistic landscape. By that time, Middle Eastern art was becoming more popular, thanks in large part to the advent of the internet, the openings of auction houses, galleries, and museums in the Middle East, and the influence of Iran's reformist government under Mohammad Khatami.

In 2009, Heller and art historian Layla Diba organized "Selseleh/Zelzeleh: Movers and Shakers in Contemporary Iranian Art," an exhibition showcasing both pioneering and young artists in Iran's contemporary-art movement. The exhibition was well-received, leading to a profile of Heller by the New York Times. The gallery moved locations to Chelsea in 2010, before returning to the Upper East Side in 2019, where it returned to dealing in the secondary market.

In 2006, Heller and her two sons visited Dubai, which had become a burgeoning hub for museums, auction houses, and galleries. She fell in love with the area and the people. Two art fairs, Art Dubai and Abu Dhabi Art, had started around that time, and Heller became a frequent participant in both. Due to her reputation and expertise in representing Middle Eastern art, Heller's patrons and friends encouraged her to open a space in the United Arab Emirates. In 2015, Heller opened her Dubai gallery – the largest commercial gallery in the UAE at 16,000 square feet with 32 foot ceilings, comprising three exhibition spaces. The Dubai space mainly features Western artists to expose Western art in the Middle East, as well as prominent other international artists. Both of Heller's galleries contribute to a growing dialogue of the intersection between Western and Eastern art.

Personal Life

Heller lives in New York City with her husband, Henry Heller, who she married in 1989. She has two sons. Alexander and Phillip. Phillip lives in New York with his wife. Heller has been featured in various publications, including the New York Times, the New York Post, Art in America, ARTnews, Artforum, Canvas Magazine, Vogue Arabia, Harper's Bazaar Middle East, Architectural Digest, Behrens, the Financial Times, Selections, and Forbes. She has also given many talks and lectures in various museums around the world including the Guggenheim, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, La Moca, Sotheby's, Christie's, and Asia Society Museum in New York. Leila is the coauthor of Persian Feasts, a cookbook published by Phaidon in 2024, written in English and French.