Jennifer Doran was in a desperate place on the evening of Feb. 23, 2023, when she quietly interrupted a celebration that Robischon Gallery was throwing for its 45th anniversary and summoned the artists in attendance to join her in a back room.
There, Doran, who owns the gallery, let out a secret. She was dying, she told the artists, some of whom had been on her roster for many years. Her liver was failing. A transplant was the only option. She needed to find a donor, and members of her family were not a match.
Doran implored the artists to help spread the word, and explained that a donor would have to give up only a portion of their organ for the procedure. She just needed one person to step up.
Among the group was Derrick Velasquez, an artist who had signed on with the gallery in 2010, when he was just out of grad school. “I just remember kind of, like, staring off into the distance,” he said. “I was thinking how difficult it must have been to ask for something like this.”
Velasquez was recalling that moment during a recent interview, a few hours before his latest exhibit opened at Robischon. The show, which runs through Dec. 31, is his first at the gallery since an operation in July 2023, when doctors removed 58 percent of his liver and gave it to Doran, thereby saving her life.
He is doing fine now, he said. His liver has grown back to 90 percent of what it was before the procedure. The thin vertical scar on his abdomen is fading.
Doran, 70, has had a rough recovery. She was in the hospital for nearly four weeks after the surgery and suffered six spontaneous back fractures as osteoporosis developed in her weakened body. But her new liver is functioning well now. She has returned to work nearly full-time and was healthy enough to oversee the installation of Velasquez’s show.
“A lot of transplant patients are really feeling great after a few months,” she said. “That was not my case.”
She called the transplant one of two miracles that have kept her alive over decades of battling primary biliary cholangitis, an autoimmune disease that damages the liver slowly.
“The first miracle was being told that I had six months to live at age 45, but that there was a new experimental drug available that took six months to work. And it did,” she said.
But she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, she said, knowing the medicine was not going to be effective for her whole life.
“But, then I had my other miracle,” she said. “Which was Derrick.”
Velasquez, 42, said he signed up quickly on a list of potential donors and immediately began exercising, and cutting out alcohol and processed foods like hot dogs — one of his favorite meals — just in case.
He also thought deeply, he said, and at times questioned his decision, especially as he went through the medical tests and psychological counseling required to determine if he was a suitable candidate. Doctors and social workers at Anschutz Medical Campus in nearby Aurora, Colo., where the operation took place, want to know a donor’s motive — and if they feel pressured or are being compensated.
Most transplanted livers at the hospital come from patients who check a box on their driver’s license and then die suddenly; their recipients never knew them. But voluntary donations, often from relatives or friends, can come with complications. “We want to make sure the donor is not being coerced somehow,” said Dr. Trevor L. Nydam, the interim chief of transplant surgery at Anschutz. “That is rare, but it does happen and it is something we want to be careful with.”
The medical team also let Velasquez know he could back out until the very last minute, and that gave him about four weeks to contemplate the impending procedure. Friends and family weighed in with different opinions, including his mother, who asked him to reconsider.
“You’re as healthy as you can be, and you’re going to put yourself at the risk of dying at some point,” he said. “Why?”
And for whom, he questioned. Doran was his gallerist, but both acknowledged in recent interviews that, while there was an easy rapport between them and years of trust, they never considered each other close friends before the procedure.
Instead, both talked about a bond that they believe develops between many artists and their gallerists as they carry out their work. They may not go out for cocktails, or watch sports together, but conversations between the two parties can get intimate. They know quite a bit about each other’s finances, and they discuss the ideas that inspire art-making and define careers for artists and gallerists alike.
He would talk to her about wanting to be both a good artist and a good citizen, and about his side projects that went beyond their business interests. She supported his civic-minded work, which included serving on the Denver Arts Commission, and mentoring younger artists. Over the years, he opened two small and informal galleries to introduce emerging talent to the community — one in the basement of his home. Doran would show up at important exhibition openings, he said.
When Velasquez expressed anxiety about getting pigeonholed as a commercial artist, she encouraged him to make art beyond what she could easily sell at the gallery, art that delved into social themes, like equity, the environment and affordable housing. “I listened to him. He listened to me,” Doran said.
In turn, he said, she told about her own worries that Robischon may be perceived as a “‘a snooty, coastal gallery.’” That moved to her stories about growing up and her family in Seattle and how that formed her sense of who she is. It was all connected to work, but fell into the kind of chatter that happens between people who are actually friends. “Jennifer is good at talking about art and about actual life,” Velasquez said.
“I wouldn’t have done this for anyone,” he added. “But I would have done this for a lot of people.”
After so many years, and so many openings that he attended, and the fellow artists he got to know there, Robischon was his second home.
Velasquez went there for the first time in November 2008. He had just moved to Denver after graduating with an M.F.A. from Ohio State University. He wandered into Robischon and was mesmerized, he said. Not only did the gallery represent top Colorado artists, it was also the regional dealer for some of the international art stars he studied at school. Frank Stella and Kiki Smith were on Robischon’s roster. So was Ann Hamilton, who was showing the day he stopped by.
Two years later, Velasquez answered a call he found on Craigslist inviting artists to submit work for a group show at another local gallery. Jim Robischon, Doran’s husband and the co-owner of Robischon Gallery, was one of the jurors.
Velasquez submitted a piece in which he cut sheets of colored vinyl into hundreds of strips, each about 1 inch wide and 30 inches long, and draped them on top of each other over a piece of wood. The work was installed so that it hung flat against the wall, and viewers could see the layers of thin, vinyl strips from their sides — in the way growth rings are visible on a crosscut of a tree trunk. It was an update of geometric abstraction, using new materials and fresh angles.
“We saw the merit in that and the innovation,” Doran said. “And he was responsive to pursuing additional works like that.”
That morphed into an enduring business partnership at Robischon. The vinyl pieces have become a signature for Velasquez, and the gallery has sold many. There are several pieces in the new show, one priced at $27,000. Velasquez is also in good company at Robischon, which is concurrently hosting solo shows, in different rooms, by Ann Hamilton and Judy Pfaff.
Velasquez exhibits nationally. In 2017, he received a Painters & Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and his art-making has evolved to include many different styles. The new show also includes a series of small oil paintings and cast resin sculptures, along with works in stained glass, a craft he has recently mastered.
“It sounds weird to say, but I love that gallery and what it is,” Velasquez said.
Looking back, he said, it was that wider affection that motivated him. He knew his dealer might die without the help. What would that mean for the gallery that had nurtured his career and that of many others?
“If she wasn’t alive, I don’t think the gallery would continue to exist,” he said.
It would, according to Doran, who said she was overwhelmed, not just by Velasquez’s generosity, but also by support from other artists, gallerists and curators who stepped in to keep things going during her illness. She is emboldened, she said.
As for the artist and the dealer, that bond they spoke about has changed. They are much closer, though she is still his gallerist, he said. There is a personal relationship but there remains business.
“She is like an aunt now, maybe,” he said. “You see your aunt maybe two, three, four times a year, you go to their house and you know them. But they’re not like your parents or your close friends. That’s kind of the way we’re talking now.”
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