I’d hesitated to write about the mess created when Caroline Snow tried to sell a Banks Violette sign that he didn’t consider an artwork, without the authorization of the artist or his gallery, on behalf of a landlord who didn’t own it. I’m not a potstirrer. This is not a gossip blog, much. Mostly, I don’t want to make a messy situation worse for people caught up in it. And if they’re people I don’t know, I don’t want to add to their stress by reaching out/coldcalling/reporting it out.
THAT SAID. After writing about the original IG stories flareups and digging past Wet Paint’s reporting, it turns out I had an incomplete picture of the situation, and people familiar with the shitshow, and some of the people involved in it. Surprising no one, the whole problem tracks back to the flaky heiress and the landlord.
In an email Frank Haines corrected my characterization of New Dracula Theater as a side hustle to his work with Snow Gallery, when it was actually born from the ashes. He and Chip split with Snow in April 2025, saying the gallery was “a toxic workplace and the owner never left her bed.”
The landlord also never approved the SURRENDER DOROTHY sign, but did prevent the NDT artists from removing it when she pushed them out of the groundfloor apartment & garden. Ownership of the building recently switched to Renee D’Alto Citera, whose sister, and before that her brother, had owned the house.
I’d assumed things were chill with the landlord because in March 2025, Frank, Chip, and Caroline all donated to D’Alto Citera’s half marathon fundraiser. But given the Snow Gallery split above, it’s clear this info was out of date.
And so it is that after kicking out the artists and the gallery, the building’s owner felt entitled to the sign, too. Which, I don’t know enough about how tenant rights or property title transfers treat a borrowed sculpture installed on the roof. If the sign was just left behind, would D’Alto Citera be able to destroy it, and maybe even try keeping their deposit for her trouble? Maybe? But what if the tenants asked to take it with them, and she refused? She’s just seizing their stuff, no? Whatever she might think, the idea that it’d be her sign now seems like bullshit. And the idea that she could just expropriate an artwork is even more ridiculous.
So it is buck wild that this where gallerist Caroline Snow comes in. According to someone familiar with the timeline, the landlord approached Snow about selling her [sic] Banks Violette [sic] sculpture [sic] AFTER New Dracula Theater’s show ended, and the artists got pushed out. [I’m avoiding saying evicted, because I think it was messier than that.] So SURRENDER DOROTHY was not chilling on the roof; it had been seized.
And knowing this, Snow contacts Violette, who says the work is not for sale, and then who—as the chat screenshots show—said it was not even a work, and was intended to be destroyed. And THIS is when Snow is like, “Understood.” and puts it on Artsy. And after that, Violette’s dealer Todd Von Ammon tells her to take it down, which she only does AFTER the whole thing gets aired on Insta.
Through this whole saga, I’ve tried to figure out wtf Snow was thinking. And I kept coming back to The Great Gatsby, that Caroline Snow is a careless person who smashed up things and then retreated back into her money, and let other people clean up the mess she had made.
As I typed it out just now I remembered that Fitzgerald’s story, too, unfolded under a problematic billboard looming over a gritty Long Island highway. And now I definitely want to figure out what’s happened/happening with the sign.
