Our Story

United by a penchant for rule-breaking and a dedication to accessibility, Laurie De Chiara and Stefan Saffer of ArtPort Kingston have been establishing and curating left-of-center, industry-leading experiential art organizations for over 25 years.

Without declaration, they would (first individually and then collaboratively) pave a way for the commercial and popular rise of interactive art experiences and galleries world-wide.

This is one version of their story…

Both De Chiara and Saffer were born curious.

De Chiara’s mother had a PhD in arts education and would host art classes for the neighborhood kids. Frequent trips to the Whitney, the MET and other cultural institutions in NYC acquainted the young to-be curator with a deep comfort in art spaces; her taste, an intuitive sense of the art that most moved her, was developed early among these years with her mother and peers.

Saffer had quite the opposite experience; born in rural Franconia in a village of about 40-people to a farming family, the desire to be an artist was shunned and so repressed. Still, growing up with a DIY livelihood and as the oldest child, the young artist experienced a sense of great freedom which allowed for the flourishing of imagination. Leaving his parents at 18 to join the civil-service brought Saffer to the city of Nuremberg, where his artistic studies began.

As their lives, their careers, too, began very distinct from each other.

In her early twenties, De Chiara interned under Peggy Guggenheim in Venice. Guggenheim authored an unconventional approach towards curating where art was organized to be lived with. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection was a very non-traditional space (for its time) where there was an emphasized sense of community among curators, artists, and patrons. This left a long-lasting effect on De Chiara who, upon returning to New York, would open her first gallery, De Chiara|Stewart Gallery, in NYC’s Chelsea neighborhood based-on similar principles.

Upon entering the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg, Saffer quickly found himself dissatisfied. His nature was at odds with the competitive nature of the institution, where students fought for the attention of professors. He became a student/artist rep and began to organize open-air events where artists from both within and without the institution could come together in collaborative participation. Unfortunately (however intentionally), these events upset the traditionalist institution and were hindered. Upon the completion of his studies, he won an exchange grant and was accepted to the MFA program at Goldsmiths College in London. There, his art-experiments in traditionally disruptive concepts of public-art would continue to develop.

Both De Chiara and Saffer, crediting equal parts chance and foresight, have exhibited a knack, time and time-again, for recognizing and investing themselves in urban environments that, soon after, bloom into industry-leading arts destinations.

This was true for the De Chiara|Stewart Gallery in Chelsea, which opened in 1997 when the area was still majority car-dealerships. This was true for Saffer’s “Sandwich Project,” which opened the same year, where artists would be invited, often selected from among Saffer’s peers at Goldsmiths, to place art on public display at a vacant house-corner on the direct path to the popular Brick Lane Market. The same was true in 2001, when De Chiara helped organize an arts fair in Miami after the inaugural Art Basel was canceled post 9/11. This was also true of Galerie müllerdechiara in Berlin, De Chiara’s second, dynamic and internationally-oriented, gallery project. Galerie müllerdechiara opened in 2001, just months after 9/11, and offered her NY-community of artists a bridge to Berlin long before it became the international arts and culture destination it is today.

It was at Galerie müllerdechiara where De Chiara and Saffer met. The space opened just down the block from where Saffer was living at the time. He had avoided the gallery when it first opened in protest, recognizing that the success of the business (as a first of its kind in the area) would likely drive up his rent. It was the open-air events and food-offerings that eventually drew him in.

A few years prior, between 1999/2000, during an artist residency in New York, Saffer recalled a party where he had interacted with a man who spoke of how his “wife was opening a gallery in Berlin that he should check out.” That had been Laurie’s party and she had left just before he arrived. Upon their meeting, De Chiara was in the divorce process with her first husband and was living full-time in Berlin. For a while, to manage the dual dynamics of curator and artist, they kept their relationship a secret.

Throughout their partnership, and all the way through giving birth to their two daughters in 2006 and 2008, De Chiara and Saffer have remained prolific.

In 2010, the couple established the non-profit ArtPod, a mobile curatorial project through which they furthered their eclectic brand of curating specifically for “non-art” audiences. Since establishing the non-profit, De Chiara’s work has become more defined by group shows where artists (through their art) are placed in conversation, and often where each piece contributes to a greater disintegration of the conventional art experience.  

Among group exhibitions such as “Imaginäire Reisen” (2012) in the Amerika Haus am Bahnhof Zoo in Berlin, and (most famously), “Play” (2021) in The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, which opened to great success amidst the global pandemic, De Chiara conspired with the company’s community of artists to break and rebuild the rules of contemporary art. Viewers were made participants, even creators, and (over and over) invited to touch, move, and even influence or act-upon the artwork. The result was astounding: lines stretched out the door; participants would explore the exhibits for 2-3 hours at a time and then return another day to go again.

Utilizing spaces known for showcasing traditional art experiences such as these, while garnering significant public attention and turnout, ArtPod’s exhibits solidified the couple’s acclaim and reputation for producing accessible, unconventional, and affectively light-heartening art experiences.

This legacy and reputation continues to expand today.

De Chiara and Saffer, now with their two teenage daughters Paulotta and Tessa, moved back to New York in 2015. They’ve settled in Kingston, NY, a historically significant city in the Hudson Valley, which rests on the edge of cultural redefinition. There, while running ArtPod from afar, the couple re-immersed themselves in the Hudson Valley and greater East Coast arts scene. De Chiara was asked to sit on multiple boards, including that of Kingston’s O+ Art Festival and, among new introductions and community, came into contact with the owners of the historic Cornell Steamboat Building. The building was underutilized and the owner, who was open to activating the space in a way that would prove beneficial for the town, offered the space to De Chiara to curate a single show. The success of that first show and several after have since turned into years in the space developing the project now affectionately known as ArtPort Kingston.

ArtPort Kingston, as placed within Cornell building’s high vaulted ceiling and grand industrial scale, made art experiences possible through the Covid-19 pandemic (2020-2021). De Chiara and Saffer kept the space open and filled with art for small groups to explore by safe distancing practices. The founders were amazed at how many people wanted, even seemed to need a place to go, and the way the art was supporting people through a difficult time. As a result, in 2020, they started ArtStream, a public exhibition of sculpture and street art along the nearby Kingston historic railway trail.  

At present, ArtPort Kingston has become a dynamic cultural destination in the Hudson Valley, with multiple, rotating exhibitions on display; it is a state-side ode to the work the couple continues to do in Berlin with ArtPod.

Settling more permanently in Kingston, the founders have since opened a satellite art-cafe and pop-up event space called ArtBuoy, as well as partnered in the purchase of a piece of property in Kingston’s Midtown with intention of developing a permanent location for ArtPort Kingston in the coming years.

De Chiara understands her job as a curator to be, in part, about offering a therapeutic experience. She believes that art is meant to exist undefined, to be given new definition over and over again in moments of interaction, and thereby to act as whatever mirror or conduit is most needed. Art, for her, is meant to take you out of your daily life and into another world, if just for a moment.

Saffer thinks back to his grandparents who raised him on the farm in Franconia and what it would have meant to create an experience of art that could have welcomed them into his passion, taking away any fear or sense of their being “out of place.”

Together they dream of integrating art into society in plentiful, meaningful ways and continue to work hard to see that dream through to fruition.

Laurie De Chiara & Stefan Saffer are… 

*ArtPort Kingston 

*ArtPod 

*ArtBuoy

*ArtStream