Avi Gitler is a Manhattan art dealer and the owner of Gitler &_____, an art gallery located in the

Hamilton Heights Hamilton Heights is a neighborhood in the northern part of Manhattan in New York City. It is the northernmost part of the West Harlem area, along with Manhattanville and Morningside Heights to its south, and it contains the sub-neighborhood an ...

neighborhood in (west

Harlem Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded roughly by the Hudson River on the west; the Harlem River and 155th Street (Manhattan), 155th Street on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and 110th Street (Manhattan), ...

), upper

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

at 3629 Broadway.

Gallery

Gitler opened his gallery in September 2014 in a storefront that was previously a beauty supply shop. Although most of his sales are made online to clients who have only seen an image of the work they are purchasing, Gitler feels strongly that "a local gallery engages people more substantively than connecting via Instagram.”

Audubon Mural Project

Soon after opening his gallery, in an effort to spruce up the look of the run-down neighborhood, Gitler got the permission of a shop owner to invite a

street artist A street artist is a person who makes art in public places. Street artists include portrait artists, caricaturists, graffiti artists, muralists and people making crafts. Street artists can also refer to street performers such as musicians, acroba ...

to paint one of the roll-down shutters on his block; the artist happened to choose to depict a

flamingo Flamingos or flamingoes are a type of Wader, wading bird in the Family (biology), family Phoenicopteridae, which is the only extant family in the order Phoenicopteriformes. There are four flamingo species distributed throughout the Americas ...

. Gitler, who was not a bird fancier, immediately decided to reference the neighborhood's history by commissioning a series of paintings on walls and shutters referencing the bird paintings of

John James Audubon John James Audubon (born Jean-Jacques Rabin; April 26, 1785 – January 27, 1851) was an American self-trained artist, naturalist, and ornithologist. His combined interests in art and ornithology turned into a plan to make a complete pictoria ...

, an artist who once lived on an estate nearby. At first the goal was to create a portrait of each species in Audubon's folio ''

The Birds of America ''The Birds of America'' is a book by naturalist and painter John James Audubon, containing illustrations of a wide variety of birds of the United States. It was first published as a series in sections between 1827 and 1838, in Edinburgh and ...

'' that is now included on the climate-threatened or climate-endangered species list of the

National Audubon Society The National Audubon Society (Audubon; ) is an American non-profit environmental organization dedicated to conservation of birds and their habitats. Located in the United States and incorporated in 1905, Audubon is one of the oldest of such organ ...

; a total of three dozen species. However, Gitler's project rapidly upped its goal to an ambition to create paintings of all 314 birds in the Audubon folio. Tom Sanford, one of the first artists Gitler engaged to paint a mural for the project, was introduced to him by Hamilton Heights resident Mark Jannot, the vice president for content of the

, an organization which subsequently agreed to co-sponsor the Mural Project.

Personal life

Gitler was born in the Bronx. He is the cousin and film buddy of ''Teaneck, New Jersey's Unofficial Ambassador'', Meir Raphael Olshin. He is also the cousin of the world famous King of car sales - Alan Tannen.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gitler, Avi American art dealers Living people Year of birth missing (living people)