About ACME Fine Art
ACME Fine Art was founded in 1996 by David Cowan and James Bennette. For the first five years, the business was primarily engaged in buying and selling fine examples of American modern art and design as exhibitors in Art and Modernism Fairs in Boston, New York, and Miami. In 2001 ACME Fine Art opened a gallery on fashionable Newbury Street in Boston. The gallery mounted regular exhibitions of Modern American Art. The exhibitions were generally of two types: solo exhibitions of artists such as Wolf Kahn, George McNeil, Lester Johnson, Hans Hofmann, and Jack Tworkov, and curated thematic/group exhibitions, with such titles as The Artists of the James Gallery, The Expressionist Landscape, and Interiors. In 2013, ACME Fine Art moved to Harrison Avenue in Boston’s SoWa (South of Washington) district, an area that contains more than forty art and design related businesses. In November 2016, Cowan and Bennette transitioned from art gallery proprietors to private art consultants and advisors, closing the gallery space and moving only a few blocks away to set up their office at 1313 Washington Street.
As a gallery, ACME Fine Art represented a select group of artists’ estates including those of Herman Maril, Kenneth Stubbs, Stephen Pace, Lester Johnson, Lillian Orlowsky, Jack Tworkov, and George McNeil among others. Additionally, the gallery frequently exhibited the work of Hans Hofmann, Wolf Kahn, Edwin Dickinson, Peter Busa, Giorgio Cavallon, Karl Knaths, and Fritz Bultman. As consultants and advisors ACME Fine Art will continue to work with artists’ estates, artists and art galleries to place fine examples of American Modern Art in museums, art collections, homes and businesses.
As always, ACME Fine Art’s specialty continues to be Modern American Art from the early twentieth century to the present day. The focus is on paintings, drawings and sculpture that reveal the various facets of American modernism: fauvism, cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, figurative expressionism, neo-expressionism, magic realism, abstraction, post-painterly abstraction, and geometric abstraction.
The principals at ACME Fine Art have helped build important and extensive art collections for many of their clients over the past twenty years. More often than not however, the task is to satisfy a client’s specific—often singular—need to help find just the right painting or sculpture for that over-the-mantle spot or stairway alcove that can be so difficult to figure out. Trained as architects, Cowan and Bennette have a particular sensitivity for how artwork fits and enhances the built environment. Whether working with art collectors, homeowners or design professionals, Cowan and Bennette enjoy helping find the right artwork for the right location and owner. ACME Fine Art is proud to have worked with such architects and designers as Barry Goralnick (Barry Goralnick Architecture & Design), Heather Wells (Heather Wells Inc.), Joseph D’Urso, (D’Urso Design Inc.), Brad Walker (Ruhl Walker Architects), Bruce Fox (Bruce Fox Design) and Richard McGeehan (McGeehan Design) on recent projects and welcomes the opportunity to do more collaborative consulting of that kind.
