Monya Rowe opened her first 200 square-foot space on the south side of Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2003. Roberta Smith of The New York Times called it "possibly the smallest white cube in the New York art world". After just 8 months in Brooklyn the gallery relocated to Chelsea, Manhattan for 10 years. In 2013, the gallery moved to Orchard Street on the Lower East Side where it was located for 2 years after which the gallery operated in Florida for 2 years. In 2018, the gallery relocated back to New York and is currently situated in the Flower/Fur District (also known as East Chelsea) of Manhattan in a former factory building used for fur storage and manufacturing. Monya Rowe Gallery focuses on exhibiting emerging artists who are making unique and significant contributions to contemporary art. The gallery has had the pleasure to exhibit many up-and-coming artists, often giving them their first New York exhibition. The list includes Angela Dufresne, Josephine Halvorson, Vera Iliatova, Jacolby Satterwhite, Devin Troy Strother, among many others. Guest curators have included Nayland Blake, Amy Sillman, Jose Lerma and the filmmaker Paul Schrader. Exhibitions at Monya Rowe Gallery have been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, The New Yorker, The Observer, Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, and many others. In 2015 the gallery received three consecutive New York Times reviews for the exhibitions of Larissa Bates (by Holland Cotter), Vera Iliatova (by Ken Johnson) and Ann Toebbe (by Roberta Smith). In The New York Times review of Larissa Bates' 2015 exhibition at Monya Rowe Gallery, Holland Cotter writes: "This month after more than a decade in New York, Monya Rowe will close her gallery and move it to St. Augustine, Fla. Originally in Brooklyn, then in Chelsea, and most recently on the Lower East Side, her gallery is one of a handful of independent-minded, tight-budget commercial spaces that function as alternatives to a corporatized art world mainstream. To sustain that model, Ms. Rowe has kept both her premises and the art she exhibits small. Her current show of work by Larissa Bates who, along with the painter Angela Dufresne, has been with the gallery from the start, is an example of this."