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Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971

September 30, 2016 – January 29, 2017
East Building, Concourse Galleries

Virginia Dwan standing in the Language III installation (May 24–June 18, 1969). Photo courtesy Dwan Archive

This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery.

Overview: The remarkable career of gallerist and patron Virginia Dwan will be featured front and center for the first time in an exhibition of some 100 works, featuring highlights from Dwan's promised gift of her extraordinary personal collection to the National Gallery of Art. Founded by Dwan in a storefront in Los Angeles in 1959, Dwan's West Coast enterprise was a leading avant-garde space in the early 1960s, presenting works by abstract expressionists, neo-dadaists, pop artists, and nouveaux réalistes, including Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Edward Kienholz, Yves Klein, Joseph KosuthArman, Martial Raysse, Niki di Sant Phalle, and Jean Tinguely. In 1965, Dwan established a gallery in New York where she presented groundbreaking exhibitions of such new tendencies as minimalism, conceptual art, and land art, featuring works by Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Dan Flavin, Michael Heizer, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Charles Ross, Robert Ryman, and Robert Smithson, among others. Dwan emerged as a leading patron of earth works during this period, sponsoring Heizer's monumental sculptures Double Negative (1969) and City (begun 1972); Smithson's masterpiece Spiral Jetty (1970); the first version of Walter de Maria's Lightning Field (1974); and Ross's Star Axis (begun 1971). The exhibition will trace Dwan's activities and the emergence of an avant-garde gallery in an age of mobility, when air travel and the interstate highway system linked the two coasts and transformed the making of art and the sites of its exhibition.

Organization: Organized by National Gallery of Art, Washington

Sponsor: The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation.

Attendance: 63,996

Catalog: Los Angeles to New York Dwan Gallery 1959-1971. By James Meyer, et al. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Other Venues: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, March 19–September 10, 2017

Issue, 1966/2016
Video, Released: February 13, 2018, (4:34 minutes)
Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery
Video, Released: January 10, 2017, (23:37 minutes)
Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971, VI: Some Art Is Hard to See: Field Trips with Virginia Dwan
Audio, Released: January 3, 2017, (41:38 minutes)
Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971, V: Liberating Artist and Exhibition: 
Dwan Gallery and the Reconceptualization of Site
Audio, Released: December 27, 2016, (41:38 minutes)
Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971, IV: Rethinking Minimalism
Audio, Released: December 13, 2016, (41:38 minutes)
Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971, III: Tableaux in Three Dimensions: Kienholz’s Social Theater at Ferus and Dwan
Audio, Released: December 6, 2016, (41:38 minutes)
Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971, II: Learning from LA
Audio, Released: November 29, 2016, (43:13 minutes)
Discoveries from the Dwan Gallery and Virginia Dwan Archives
Video, Released: November 22, 2016, (28:47 minutes)
Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971, I: West Coast, East Coast
Audio, Released: November 22, 2016, (41:38 minutes)
Discoveries from the Dwan Gallery and Virginia Dwan Archives
Audio, Released: October 11, 2016, (28:47 minutes)
Conversation with Collectors: Virginia Dwan and James Meyer
Video, Released: October 4, 2016, (64:25 minutes)
Conversation with Collectors: Virginia Dwan and James Meyer
Audio, Released: October 4, 2016, (64:25 minutes)
Press Event: Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971
Audio, Released: September 27, 2016, (11:45 minutes)
Jean Tinguely, "Odessa"
Video, Released: September 27, 2016, (2:10 minutes)
Jean Tinguely, "Portrait of Virginia"
Video, Released: September 27, 2016, (1:31 minutes)
Virginia Dwan, Journey to Southern Mexico
Video, Released: September 27, 2016, (3:51 minutes)