The émigré gallerist Ala Story (1907–1972) left London for New York around 1940, where she co-founded the American-British Art Center in New York. Organised as a gallery and clubhouse, the centre’s function was to introduce British and US artists to the public and to counteract the wartime isolation of the British art scene. An article on the opening of the centre at 44 West 56th Street in New York states: “Although the primary purpose of the American British Art Center is to help keep England’s art and artists alive while the rain of bombs continues over their homeland, works by artists of Canada and the United States will compose almost half of all the exhibitions to be shown.” (Anonymous 1941a) Exhibitions were also organised outside New York, for example in Bangor/Maine, where Photographs of Bombed London by Cecil Beaton was exhibited in 1941. A newspaper review states: “Since the air raids and war conditions in England have hit artists by not allowing any chance of showing their work nor to come in touch with the public in any way, the American British Art Center is continuing the work which so many galleries in London had to terminate. The Art Center is a non-profit organization and all net proceeds of all operations of the organization are being used to help artists in England who are in need of assistance.” (Anonymous 1941b) These and other exhibitions show that Ala Story remained in close contact with art institutions, artists and photographers even after her departure from London.

Ala Story was born Emilie Anna Maria Heyszl von Heyszenau in Vienna. She initially studied art at the Academy, but left in her twenties and moved to London, where she took up a position at the Beaux Arts Gallery. She subsequently worked in galleries such as the Redfern Gallery, Lucy Wertheim Gallery, Storran Gallery, often in a managerial position. Story opened the Stafford Gallery in St James’s, out of which she developed the British Arts Centre after 1939, working to keep works by contemporary artists visible and to facilitate acquisitions after war broke out. The British Art Centre was the first step towards her later work as the founder of the American British Art Center in New York, where she worked as a transcontinental mediator of art, consistently advocating for contemporary art in her places of exile and as a disseminator of British and European art. It was located on West 56th Street in the gallery district, where other galleries supporting exile art were located as the Norlyst Gallery, Weyhe Gallery as well as the Julien Levy Gallery.

From 1952 to 1957, Ala Story was director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. There she curated exhibitions such as Impressionism and Its influence in American Art (1954) and Paintings by Oskar Kokoschka (1954), exhibitions that focused on artistic exchange between Europe and the USA and made European artists better known.

Ala Story was not only a supporter of contemporary British and European art. In addition, she was socio-politically engaged, for example in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Anonymous 1972). And Story was part of the queer scenes in London, New York and Santa Barbara and supported other emigrants of her queer networks, such as Erica Anderson (née Erika Paula Kellner, 1914–1976). Story arranged temporary work in galleries for Erica Anderson, a photographer who had fled to London; they both arrived in New York in the same year, 1940, and Anderson took a flat above Story’s American British Art Center (Brunner 2019, 151). Anderson, who made a career as a cinematographer, and Story remained friends throughout their lives and were also connected professionally. Story’s life partner, filmmaker Margaret Mallory, appointed Anderson as chief cinematographer of her production company, Falcon Films. In 1950, Erica Anderson made a film about the US painter “Grandma Moses”, whom Story supported through exhibitions at the American British Art Center and whose work she collected. Another émigré photographer who was part of the queer network in New York and befriended with Erica Anderson, is Ruth Bernhard. Nevertheless, the queer scene and émigrés networks in New York are still few studied and need more scientific processing.