Pink Elephant Projects
64 Washington Ave., Brooklyn
pepgallery.com
Tricia Wimmer and Joe Weiner started exhibiting art from little-known artists out of their Fort Greene and Clinton Hill apartments in 2006, and they also created a Web site to showcase and sell those works. A year later, the site and their apartments were seeing so much action they decided to open a brick-and-mortar gallery. Pink Elephant Projects now mounts an exhibition about every five weeks and has participated in various art fairs, but it still retains the scrappy community feel it was founded with. It also still offers a variety of cool pieces starting as low as $30 (check out Jashar Awan’s limited-edition silkscreens) and features a section on its Web site called ArtMart that is dedicated to affordable art.

Charming Wall
191 West 4th Street, New York
charmingwall.com
This little gallery, standing alone amid the tattoo and novelty shops in New York’s West Village, offers a curated selection of quirky, wonderful, open-edition prints that never go above $80 — and that includes framing and matting, too! How does Charming Wall maintain such affordable prices? The owners are in the boutique printing business, so production costs are minimal, and the gallery maintains personal relationships with all its artists who approve each print, according to gallery director Katie McClenahan. The prints are available online, too, and the gallery also has a small monthly exhibition of original art priced anywhere from $50 to a few thousand per work. “We’re trying to get up-and-coming artists out there and provide affordable art for the masses,” McClenahan says. Less than a year old, Charming Wall has already attracted media attention from the likes of New York magazine and DailyCandy.

Etsy
etsy.com
Rob Kalin dropped out of art school and founded Etsy in 2005, with the goal of helping people make a living by making things. The result is an addictive online marketplace where you can buy anything from original artworks to handmade jewelry and clothing. According to Kalin, art is the third most popular category on the site and accounts for 10 percent of Etsy’s overall sales. “This is about the idea that art is a craft,” Kalin says. Etsy’s selection isn’t curated, so quality is hit or miss and it can be time-consuming to page through its thousands of offerings, but the site features some great finds, such as Valerie Galloway’s small hand-toned vintage-look original photographs with metal frames, which start at only $45.

Tinlark
6671 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, Calif.
tinlark.com
ARTINFO stumbled across this little gem during this year’s Armory week at the satellite fair Red Dot. “Carefully curated, affordable art — that’s what I do,” gallery director Cris McCall told us, and she has the prices — starting at $25! — and selection to prove it. If you can’t make it to Hollywood, look for Tinlark online or at smaller art fairs.

McCall recommends works by Drew Beckmeyer, Kirsten Tradowsky, Wesley Younie, Nathaniel Klein, and Nancy Baker Cahill, whose pieces sell in the $200 to $300 range. “Their pieces are compositionally exciting, super well executed, conceptually smart and funny,” she says.

Also keep your eyes open for Brooks Salzwedel’s haunting graphite, tape, and resin landscapes that start around $275, some of our favorite works at Red Dot.

Tiny Showcase
tinyshowcase.com
True to its name, the four-year-old Web site Tiny Showcase showcases prints that are, well, tiny. You can sign up for their newsletter and snatch up a limited-edition piece each Tuesday for minimal dough — from around $20 to $100 — but you have to be nimble; the works usually go within hours. Imagine covering an entire wall with these exquisite little pieces: Each one is printed with archival paper and ink, but the best part is that a percentage from each work sold goes to a charity of the artist’s choice.