Stux Star

'I answered a want ad" is Kim Heirston's modest account of her recent vault from the front desk of New York's Robert Miller Gallery to the directorship of the ultrahot Stux Gallery, best known for exhibiting the eccentric Starn twins and Andres Serrano, of Piss Christ fame. In fact, she's been preparing for this position all her life. Long Island-raised, she frequented Manhattan's museums as a child, majored in art history at Yale, and worked for an art dealer in Florence. Heirston says the Starns' fragmented photographs first led her to the Stux Gallery—"I've been following them since before their breakthrough at the 1987 Whitney Biennial." And this month she showcases their new, transparent photographs, held together with industrial clamps. Though she was nearly sidetracked into modeling ("I was spotted dancing wildly at Area"), Heirston now devotes herself entirely to art. She even lives like an artist, "in a nitty-gritty loft downtown." Her plans for Stux? 'To make the gallery more international." Her boss, Stefan Stux, raves, "We get along marvelously. We can read each other's minds with ease. I owe it to my artists to have a director with talents to match theirs."

AMY FINE COLLINS