The Vito Acconci Estate’s War With Their Landlord, Two Trees

What happened to the estate of the artist and architect Vito Acconci almost feels like one of his performances. In the ’60s and ’70s, Acconci helped hone the form with simple experiments — like masturbating under a gallery floor or following strangers. In 1971, he wrote a note that, before his death, he would drop off a key in an envelope and the first person to pick it up “will be free to use my apartment, and its contents, any way he wishes.”

Acconci never dropped off a key, but in 2017, he died without a will. A long legal process over back rent has left his studio at 20 Jay Street, in Dumbo — and its artwork, archives, and idiosyncratic library — under the temporary control of its landlord, Two Trees, a company that has tempered its image as a gentrifying force in Dumbo by subsidizing rents for artists, like Acconci himself. He was a tenant since 1998, but by 2019, his estate had stopped paying rent. In April 2023, Two Trees won a judgment for $410,165.08, and this Spring a judge ruled that it could collect that by taking a chunk of what Acconci left behind to “sell … in a commercially reasonable manner.”

Usually, in a case where art is ordered to be sold to settle a claim, the attorney Judd Grossman has “sent the sheriff in to take art, go sell it at auction, get your money and get out. And that’s not at all what this process has looked like.” Grossman specializes in art-world fights, and was hired by Two Trees to unknot this one. He says the issue is that Acconci didn’t leave a stack of artwork intended for sale: He left behind a meticulous archive of a life in New York’s avant-garde poetry, performance, and design scenes. Much of the more than 2,500 square-foot space at 20 Jay Street is filled with rows of metal filing cabinets and flat-files, where Acconci stored documentation about every work he had made over the 50 years, in folders marked with his trademark white chalk capital letters on black paper. A Sotheby’s executive, who helped Maria at the beginning of the process, told Aartnet that it was “not an archive as much as a work of art in itself.” And his library was just as calculated, organized by “general ontological categories — such as ‘Time’, ‘Space’, ‘Matter’, ‘Body’, ‘Life,’ ‘Mind’ and ‘Signs’,” according to an article in Frieze that described how Acconci suggested that his library “might be the single best piece he ever did.”

Selling any individual work could mess with record-keeping and preserving the artist’s legacy, and then there’s the problem of how to deem it an Acconci. “As far as authenticity and integrity of a work to be sold, you obviously want the blessing of the estate,” said Grossman.
But the estate is on the other side of the lawsuit, and sees what’s happening as a calculated cash grab. “The archive was not supposed to be sold, ever,” said Maria Acconci, Vito’s widow. She says what’s in the studio is almost a single work. “That’s why this is so upsetting to me because it’s basically destroying Vito. If you dismantle the studio, it’s destroying him. And I will not let that happen.” She called the landlord’s seizure “a premeditated short selling scheme.”

Maria Mirabal came to New York from Dallas to study at Pratt, but ended up falling in love with Acconci from afar, after seeing a show of his work in Barcelona in 2004. She sent an email, and they met after one of his talks. He had a childlike intensity that made it easy to forget their age gap — more than 40 years — and she quickly fell into a role as his “protector,” she said. “People would call me ‘The Vito Whisperer,’” asking her to accompany him to exhibitions and events. He proposed early in their relationship, but they didn’t marry until 2014, she says. Meanwhile, they were working together as artists: reading spare poetry at the same museums, putting together a retrospective of his work at MoMA PS1. “If I woke up, I was like, Oh my God, I have an idea. And then we would immediately just jot it down and work on it.”

Vito and Maria Acconci at the Museum of Modern Art in 2016.
Photo: Christopher Gregory/The New York Times/Redux

But if any blue chip artist was likely to fail to plan for his death, it might have been Acconci. He started off as a poet and seemed actively disinterested in money, sometimes finding himself in debt to gallerists who loaned him cash, pleading with him to photograph his performances so he would have something to sell. Teaching at art schools kept him afloat, even as he pivoted to escape the art world and found his own design firm (of which one of its enduring works is the architectural institution, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, which he designed with Steven Holl). In a 2016 interview, Maria said she had to convince him to do the MoMA retrospective because “Vito does not like to go back to his past.” When he died, in April 2017, it was sudden, Maria said. Still, she immediately knew what he would have wanted, telling the press about plans for a center devoted to his work. That summer, she fought in court to be named as his executor, then went public with a partnership with Pace Gallery and Sotheby’s to represent his estate. Which is when things turned sour. She says Pace was depositing money in the studio’s account to pay the rent. (Pace did not respond to that claim, but said it has not represented the estate since 2021.) Meanwhile, she says the landlord raised the rent from a subsidized $7,000 to a market rate of $12,000 in April 2019. Maria and the studio’s operational director Joshua Selman said that Two Trees suggested that Studio Acconci apply for a grant to subsidize their rent, but they said Two Trees and its Cultural Affairs department rejected that application. Two Trees says she wasn’t even able to make rent eight times at the subsidized $7,000 level since Acconci’s death. “After providing deeply discounted space for more than two decades, Two Trees worked with the estate for years after Mr. Acconci’s death to explore every potential avenue to accommodate the estate and protect this collection,” said the managing director for Two Trees, David Lombino.

20 Jay Street is managed by Two Trees. In 2004, Acconci started renting here — taking an office in suites 215 and 216 and using suite 250 for storage.
Photo: Google Maps

In the meantime, she stopped paying. The building’s managing agent, Gloria Arce, said in an affidavit that Two Trees had “attempted” to negotiate extending the lease, but on February 25, 2020 they gave the studio a month to move out. That was difficult timing; the pandemic put a strain on the work of the Studio and the estate, but a moratorium on evictions pushed the order back until May 2022.

It’s not clear that the estate or the studio has the money to pay the backrent they’d need to satisfy the judgment. In January of this year, Acconci Studio filed for bankruptcy. The filing says that in addition to the judgment that Two Trees won, the studio owes $132,874.83 on a storage unit in Jersey City. Maria says her personal accounts were frozen and she no longer expects loans from Pace. Sotheby’s didn’t respond to a request for comment. “All my funds are going to lawyers to fight this,” Maria said.

A bankruptcy filing gives a peek into the studio at 20 Jay Street. From left: Photo: Pick & Zabicki LLPPhoto: Pick & Zabicki LLP

A bankruptcy filing gives a peek into the studio at 20 Jay Street. From left: Photo: Pick & Zabicki LLPPhoto: Pick & Zabicki LLP

But the bankruptcy failed to delay Two Trees from moving forward. In February, the landlord won a ruling that gave them permission to enter Acconci’s units and “safeguard the property, including without limitation artwork, sculptures, fixtures, equipment, and furniture contained therein.” The problem is, Maria Acconci says, every part of the studio constitutes a sort of archive that she thinks should not be broken up. Right now, no one is trying. The landlord and the estate seem to be at a standstill, and the units are left as they once were, as if each side is waiting for the other to cave. To Maria, that’s a “silver lining.” “Yes, this has been a horrible nightmare, but guess what? Nothing has been touched. And in those seven years, I’ve kept everything just as it was. It looks like Vito never left.”

The Two Trees lawyer, Judd Grossman, says the studio has been left intact out of the landlord’s interest in working together. “The whole goal here is to not break up anything. It’s to do with Maria’s blessing and to try and figure out the best way for everybody.”

She would like to someday move it all into a new space — one that isn’t owned by Two Trees. If someone asks her to authenticate against her will, she plans to refuse, saying, “Yeah, they came from the studio, but they’re just things now. And that’s what he would want anyway. He was a rebel.”