Last summer, I kept receiving emails about a new venue called Galerie Sardine. I wondered—who would name a gallery after a tiny fish that swims in schools and gets tightly packed into flat tins? The answer: artist Joe Bradley and his spirited wife, Valentina Akerman.

“You can take it with you,” Akerman told me when I visited them in Bradley’s spacious Long Island City studio. “It’s also not a fancy fish, and we like that.” Neither had run an art gallery before, but they took over a 1701 farmhouse on Main Street in Amagansett, at the eastern tip of Long Island, and hosted several shows that drew crowds of local and visiting art lovers—including Larry Gagosian, the art world’s biggest name, who summers in Amagansett.

“Joe and I have been collaborating since we met,” Akerman said. Their backgrounds couldn’t be more different. Akerman, dark-haired and lively, grew up in Bogotá, Colombia. Bradley, quieter but just as playful, was raised in Kittery, Maine, a charming coastal town, as one of nine children (seven of them adopted, not including Joe). His father was an ER doctor. Her father, now retired, was an economics professor at Colombia’s National University and wrote political editorials for a Sunday paper.

“He’s an incredibly bright person, engaged with the world and passionate about art, music, and everything else,” she said. “My energy comes from him—I can talk to him about anything.” Her mother, now an author, was a Freudian therapist who worked with children and teens. “My classmates were scared of her,” Akerman admitted. “They didn’t want to come over because they thought she was like a witch—mysterious, a little cold, but also alluring.” (“She’s very glamorous,” Bradley added.)

When Akerman was 16, her parents divorced. Her mother began writing books about her childhood in El Chocó, an isolated jungle on Colombia’s Pacific coast. Akerman studied architecture, moved to New York for her master’s at Columbia, then worked at the prestigious Davis Brody Bond firm before leaving after a metastatic thyroid cancer diagnosis. She was freelancing as an art director when she met Bradley.

Bradley’s childhood love for drawing never faded. He immersed himself in underground comics—R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, “that kind of thing”—and studied art books on Picasso, Matisse, Miró, Calder, Warhol, and Lichtenstein at Kittery’s public library, often visiting the Portland Museum too. “But it wasn’t until RISD that I really caught the painting bug and started seeing,” he said. “Suddenly, I was exposed to all of art history.” A small Cézanne landscape at the RISD Museum, On the Banks of a River (ca. 1904-1905), struck him as “kind of abject and punk rock,” making him feel “not that I could understand it, but that I could read it.” (Bradley once fronted a punk band called Cheeseburger.)

By the time he and Akerman got together, his career was taking off. His bold, colorful paintings had already gained attention—he had a solo show at MoMA PS1 in 2006, just seven years after graduating from RISD. The New York Times’ Roberta Smith called his early work “ironic, anti-painting paintings… post-conceptual and challenging.” He’s been represented by top New York galleries ever since—Canada, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Gagosian, Petzel, and, since 2023, David Zwirner. The vibrant new paintings filling his Long Island City studio will be on view this summer at Zwirner.”It’s funny,” he says. “It can be a bit nerve-racking—like you’re slowly revealing more of yourself, and hoping you don’t turn out so bad in the end.”