NEW YORK—When Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett started the nonprofit gallery Triple Candie in 2001, they weren’t intending to raise controversy. The 5,000-square-foot warehouse space was well suited for large solo projects, multimedia work, and experimental installations, and Triple Candie quickly established itself as one of three prominent contemporary art venues in Harlem, the others being the Studio Museum and the Project (which later moved to 57th Street). Early notable exhibitions included “Living Units,” a group exhibition of domestic environments curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud; a Sanford Biggers solo show for which he created a 40-by-20-foot sand painting; and David Humphrey’s “Snowman in Love,” featuring 12-foot-tall, commercially manufactured inflatable snowmen.

In 2006 the gallery took a provocative new direction when it decided to present two exhibitions consisting of re-creations of artworks by well-known artists mounted without their permission. “David Hammons: The Unauthorized Retrospective,” consisting of photocopies of the artist’s work from Web sites, catalogs, and brochures, was followed by “Cady Noland Approximately,” a fake survey of the notoriously reclusive artist’s oeuvre that used copies of her work made by Triple Candie and four other artists. Noland — who had stated that she doesn’t want her work shown in public and asked galleries to remove it from shows — garnered a great deal of sympathy as a result of the project, including from such critics as the Village Voice’s Jerry Saltz, who suggested that she sue the gallery.

Indeed, many have had similar reactions to Bancroft and Nesbett’s strategy of forgoing artists in creating their exhibitions, but one thing can’t be denied: The two have made a bold statement that at the very least deserves considered analysis. Rather than cheerleading for artists and boosting careers, Triple Candie has taken the lonelier path of challenging the art world by turning tradition on its head.

When the gallery had to close last year for its landlord to do work on the building, it wasn’t clear what the future held for the endeavor. But on February 15, Triple Candie returns, in a new space at 500 West 148th Street, just west of Amsterdam Avenue.

On the eve of the gallery’s relaunch, ARTINFO sat down with the husband-and-wife team, who are also the co-publishers of Art on Paper, to discuss the future of Triple Candie and its controversial past.

Shelly and Peter, how will the new space differ from the original?

The new space is one-third the size of the original. The size of the first Triple Candie dictated so much of what we did and also gave it a kind of grandeur that this new space doesn’t quite have. But our mission is going to stay the same. We are still going to be creating shows without artists, building installations that have to do with art, but not actually showing art, and making it more about education and art history.

What is the first exhibition?

We are opening with an exhibition of floral still-life "paintings" that we bought at El Mundo, a big economy department store around the corner from the new Triple Candie. The paintings are sold as anonymous objects without authors, dates, or histories. In fact, they are reproductions of lesser-known Old Master paintings that somewhere in the distribution channel — between China and Harlem — lost their identities. In that way, the exhibition will tie into our "Anonymous Artist Projects" from 2004 and 2005.

Our second show will be a Picasso retrospective that doesn’t include any real Picassos. That would be impossible to realize in Harlem; probably only MoMA and a few high-end commercial galleries could organize it. We’re going to create surrogates of the Picasso artworks, probably large pieces of cardboard cut to the scale of the actual paintings with a small reproduction taped to each. To anyone visiting the gallery, it will look like an exhibition in the midst of being installed — the moment right before the artwork arrives. We will be waiting for it to arrive for the entire show.