Gagosian Quarterly Celebrated Its Latest Issue With a Q&A Between Anderson Cooper and Nathaniel Mary Quinn

In addition to catapulting artists to art-history textbook fame, Gagosian Gallery also publishes a magazine, Gagosian Quarterly and its most recent issue features a Q&A between Anderson Cooper and the artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn. With an introduction by gallerist and art critic Bill Powers, the conversation was so riveting readers may have felt there was more to be said—and apparently the magazine felt the same way. On Saturday evening at the National Arts Club, the interviewer and interviewee came together once again but this time there was an audience.

As Cooper tells it, he first discovered the artist on, of all places, Instagram. “I don’t remember if it was a discover page, or how I first came across his work,” said the CNN anchor. “It wasn’t until I did a studio visit that I realized he wasn’t making collages—it was all charcoal, gouache, and pastels.” A budding art collector, Cooper soon acquired a couple of Quinn’s works, and ever since, the two have remained friends—several months ago Quinn and his wife, Donna Augustin-Quinn, were even welcomed to Cooper’s home in Bahia, Brazil.

“He invited me a couple of times and I finally took him up on the offer to see if it was real. Instantly he set it all up; everyone was so hospitable,” explained Quinn just before taking the stage for the Q&A.

Set in a back room on the ground floor of The National Arts Club, the conversation began with the revelation that both Cooper and Quinn had history at the Gramercy Park town house. Cooper once rented a room there, and Quinn received one of his first awards from the club while in graduate school at NYU. The conversation dove deep into Quinn’s uncomfortable history and his childhood spent in one of Chicago’s most notorious projects. While away at boarding school—his enrollment granted via scholarship—his mother passed away. A couple of weeks later, Quinn returned home for Thanksgiving break to find the apartment that he shared with his father and four brothers completely vacant. Abandoned by his family with no trace or explanation, Quinn was instantly orphaned and sibling-less at age 15.

The heartbreaking story shook the audience to its core, but before them was a man who had learned to take his deepest insecurities and turn them into something good. He still gives credit to his father, a man who, though illiterate, was able to teach young Quinn how to sketch. And for his mother, he had the foresight to adopt her first name, Mary, as his middle name. “She was a poor black woman that the world forgot,” he told the audience. “So now when my name is displayed in Beverly Hills at the Gagosian Gallery, her memory lives on.”