Pietro Brooke Robert Alexander and Sara Apple Maliki exchanged wedding vows May 22 at an art gallery in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. Shortly after, the gallery opened to the public for its inaugural exhibition, aptly titled “The Wedding Show.”
It featured works by 14 artists, including Cristine Brache, John Altoon and Daniel Healey, and the public portion of the event was initially restricted to two rooms in the 7,500-square-foot loft, while the wedding guests could wander throughout.
“The room we got married in was one of the gallery rooms,” Maliki said. “The platform that we got married on remained and became like its own installation in the show.”
The event marked a new personal and professional chapter for Alexander, an art dealer, and Maliki, a writer, actress and filmmaker who goes by Sara Apple professionally, who dated long-distance between the East and West Coasts from 2022 until recently. The two plan to run the new gallery, called Pietro Alexander, in one section of the space and live in another.
“It’s a very bohemian situation,” Maliki said. “A huge factor of our relationship was him being able to move his business from L.A. to New York, and I think that as an art dealer, it’s the same thing as being a writer, in that your work is your life. There aren’t the same professional boundaries that exist for other people.”
The gallery was operated by Alexander’s uncle, Brooke Alexander, for several decades until his death in 2022. Alexander will run the gallery; Maliki will organize cultural programming.
Maliki, 33, was born in Key West, Fla., and grew up between there and Manhattan. She taught herself to write screenplays, and wrote a script for a film called “Lipstick Palm” with her friend, the actress Julia Fox.
Alexander, 28, was born and raised in Santa Monica, Calif., and received a bachelor’s degree in art history and literary arts from Brown. Between 2022 and late last year, he ran an art gallery in Los Angeles called Spy Projects.
In September 2022, Alexander received an email from Maliki asking to purchase a piece of art by Jaxon Demme, whose work Alexander was exhibiting at Spy Projects, for a client in Los Angeles. After the sale went through, Alexander offered to install the work at the client’s house himself.
When he saw Maliki outside, the first thing he noticed was “how spectacularly straight and white her teeth are,” he said. “I text my friend, ‘this art adviser is kind of cute.’”
Inside, Alexander discovered that Maliki wasn’t an art adviser; rather, she was helping a friend with his interior design, something she did for work on and off for years.
Maliki was surprised to find that the gallery owner with whom she’d corresponded was only 24.
“I was not expecting him to be so young, and I also thought he was very polite and dynamic,” Maliki said. “I remember asking, ‘What’s your thing?’ It’s L.A., so of course, I was like, whose kid is this?” (His parents are Peter Alexander, an artist, and Claudia Parducci, a painter and sculptor.)
A few hours after they met, Alexander reached out to Maliki to ask her on a date. Maliki, who lived in New York and was only planning to be in Los Angeles for a week, agreed. The next day, she met Alexander at his gallery, and they went for dinner at Road to Seoul, a Korean barbecue restaurant in Koreatown.
Alexander was instantly smitten. “I told Sara I was in love with her two days later,” he said. “I wouldn’t have waited that long if I knew it wasn’t going to scare her off.”
“When Pietro decides something, he’s fully committed to it,” she said. “He has no idea how he’s going to pull it off, but he just goes for it 100 percent. I find that to be a really admirable quality because I am completely the opposite.”
They saw each other every day for the rest of Maliki’s visit, and she changed her flight twice to stay longer.
“I don’t remember much of what we were doing,” Alexander said. “I was really focused on Sara. I don’t think either of us cared if we went anywhere.”
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After Maliki flew back to New York, they began dating long-distance.
Maliki said that after having been in back-to-back relationships from age 16, she wanted “time for personal growth,” as she described it. But she also found the physical distance between her and Alexander allowed them to grow together.
“Being in a relationship with him gave me this safety and grounding that I never had,” Maliki said. “He gave me the confidence to allow myself to be seen. I walked around most of my life expecting to be misunderstood and wanting to be insular and isolated, and Pietro really has allowed me to be who I always meant to be.”
For Alexander, dating Maliki opened the door to inward reflection. His father had died in 2020 after being sick for many years.
“I was 24, and I had basically been on this constant roll since my dad died,” Alexander said. “I’d been doing one thing after another, not looking back, just pressing and pushing. By finding Sara and because there’s so much about her I admire, the order, work ethic, elegance. I thought, who do I want to be? What am I going to be like? Sara was an integral part of that.”
In fall 2023, Pietro’s aunt Carolyn Alexander suggested having a Spy Projects pop-up at the gallery in SoHo, now Pietro Alexander. Maliki curated the show, which opened in April 2024.
“We got to live a dream for a couple of months of what it would be like to put on shows in this space,” Maliki said.
The seed was planted.
In March 2025, Alexander decided he would propose to Maliki while she was on a monthlong visit to Los Angeles.
“When I get a gut instinct like that, I go for it,” Alexander said.
He called his mother to ask for his maternal grandmother’s wedding band, arrived at the bungalow in Bronson Canyon where he and Maliki were staying, and got down on one knee.
“I say, ‘Baby, I love you so much, I want to spend the rest of my life with you,’” Alexander said. “Halfway through, Sara looks at me, completely aghast, and says, ‘Do you have cancer?’” One of her sisters had been diagnosed with cancer not long before.
“I said, ‘No, dummy, I’m proposing to you,’” Alexander continued.
“It was an emphatic yes,” Maliki said.
That summer, one of Brooke and Carolyn Alexander’s daughters, Emily Alexander, reached out to ask Pietro if he wanted to open a gallery in the space where her father’s had been (Emily owns the space).
“Brooke died a year or two after my dad did,” Alexander said. “There’s something sentimental to it. It looks exactly the same. This has been the place where someone in the family has had a gallery for a very long time.”
The initial idea to combine the wedding with an exhibition came from the couple’s friend Stefan Bondell. “We really wanted an old-school New York party where people just show up and bring friends,” Maliki said.
The wedding was officiated by Jacob Greenberg, a friend who was ordained through the Universal Life Church for the occasion, before 200 guests. After the ceremony, the doors to the gallery opened to the public, and Maliki and Alexander went outside to take photos with their families.
When they returned, the gallery “was mobbed with people,” Alexander said. People had indeed shown up and brought friends.
The wedding guests had about three-quarters of the space to themselves, with lounge areas, a couple of bars and a 24-foot grazing table and hors d’oeuvres catered by Sammy Koolik, who previously worked as a head line chef at Eleven Madison Park. For dessert, Maliki and Alexander skipped the traditional choice — “Pietro hates cake,” she said — and opted for Key lime pie, a nod to the bride’s roots.
The D.J. set up at the altar where Maliki and Alexander were wed and played disco and ’90s house music.
“Each room had a different feeling,” Maliki said. “As the night went on, in one corner room, people were smoking cigarettes out the window, in another room were parents and family. At midnight, there was a full-blown party going on.”
On This Day
Where Pietro Alexander, SoHo
When May 22, 2026
A Fortuitous Encounter Maliki worked as a nanny from age 20 to 23 for a family with whom she has remained close. Her former charge’s mother is Francesca Amfitheatrof, who was the artistic director for watches and jewelry at Louis Vuitton. Maliki said she and Alexander weren’t sure where to get their rings. “And then I ran into Francesca on the subway. She said, ‘I’m just going to make the rings for you guys.’”
Last-Minute Scramble A few weeks before the wedding, Alexander and Maliki realized that because construction hadn’t been completed in the space, there would only be one bathroom for more than 200 people. “We had to rent a movie trailer with bathrooms in it,” Maliki said.
Old-School Glam Maliki wore a Dior dress by John Galliano that she planned to pair with a more classic hair and makeup look. But at the last minute, John Novotny, a hairstylist, and Jake DuPont, a makeup artist, who both work with Julia Fox, convinced her to go for something more memorable. “They said let’s do a bouffant with a Priscilla Presley/Lana Del Rey kind of feeling,” Maliki said. “I’m glad I listened.”
The post The Wedding Was Part of a Show, and the Show Was Part of the Wedding appeared first on New York Times.
