Virginia Doan, the merchant whose short-lived exhibition propelled many Minimalist and Land artists to fame during the late 1960s and early 1970s, died on September 4 after a battle with cancer. A representative of her archive said that she was 90 years old.
In the past decade, Duane has been revered as one of the greatest American merchants of the 20th century for her sensitivity to risk and her willingness to put money behind game-changing artwork.
Her gallery, which opened in Los Angeles and later moved to New York, has been in operation for just over a decade, but in that time, it has helped galvanize the lives of artists such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, Fred Sandback, Karl Andre, William Anastasi, and others. Along the way, I collected a rich collection of art from that era, which was pledge as gift To the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2013.
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Museums celebrated Duane, artists admired her, and merchants who were influenced by her promoted her. But she always stayed out of the spotlight, and The New York Times Critic Holland Cotter mentioned Curator James Mayer had to convince her to agree to a 2016 offer to clear her exhibition. The show ended up appearing at the National Gallery of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and was widely praised.
All of this may explain why prior to the 2016 retrospective show, Dwan was considered an underestimated number. The The New York Times He interviewed her in 2003 for Article – Commodity Titled “The Forgotten Godmother of Zia Artists”. Writing X-TRA In 2011 critic Jessica Dawson Requested“Why did Dwan become so unrecognized in the development of post-war Los Angeles art?”
Virginia Doan was born in 1931 in Minneapolis to a middle-class family. She was the heiress to 3M fortune – no The heir but a Heiress as indicated in her country in 2003 times In an interview, in which there were 17 other people with her. She briefly attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied art, and then dropped out. She married a medical student and had a daughter.
In 1959, she opened her gallery in the Westwood section of Los Angeles. Initially it was the show of Yves Klein, a French painter of monochrome blues who had never had a solo exhibition in the United States. “By 1959, I wanted to have an exhibition for a while, though I didn’t know anything about it, really,” Tell Artforum In 2014. “I just went ahead and did it anyway – innocent people outside sort of thing.”
In 1962, Dwan moved her gallery to a new location in Los Angeles. That same year, she installed “My Country’ Tis of Thee,” which was considered one of the premiere pop performances in the United States benefiting from interest in Andy Warhol’s famous Ferus Gallery earlier that year, which featured his paintings of Campbell’s Soup. Cans, Duane’s collection of works that included “forbidden” consumer images. Pieces by Marisol, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselman have hung alongside works by Bob pioneers, including Jasper Johns and Edward Kienholz.
The Duane Gallery expanded to New York in 1965, and in 1967, the Los Angeles space was closed, leaving only the Manhattan Auditorium. Duane cemented her reputation in New York as a major proponent of land art, which often involved direct interventions in the landscape as a form of sculpture. She said she funded these ambitious projects because it was exciting to see them realized, rather than just having them as unrealized concepts displayed as works on paper in gallery settings. (Although some of these pieces, known as earthworks, were put on permanently, they also brought smaller related projects into their gallery.)
She is famous for having paid $30,000 to make Michael Heiser double error (1969), digging a trench in the Nevada desert. “I didn’t see it until after I finished it,” Duane said. The New York Times. “This is how I did. If I believed in the artist, I trusted him.” It later provided Heizer with a loan for the first part of the project that would become the recent opening city.
Duane also allocated money to Robert Smithson spiral pier (1970), a statue composed of basalt, clay, and salt crystals arranged in a spiral pattern on a lake in Utah. This work was also something Duane felt confident about, despite having little interaction with.
“For excavation,” she Tell an interview In 2016, “It was the openness and the feeling of having no boundaries that made it so exciting. For me it wasn’t a leap of faith.”
These days, the Duane Gallery continues to conquer some scrutiny by showcasing men almost exclusively – an imbalance that wasn’t entirely uncommon in the era, even among female merchants. In several interviews, Duane has carefully acknowledged that the response wasn’t entirely wrong. But she said to times In 2003, “I never thought about sex.”
Duane shocked the art world by closing a store in 1971—she simply didn’t feel like spending more money on the project, she said. Instead, she devoted herself to an art of her own making, taking pictures that have since been published in books. In 1996, with artist Charles Ross and architect Laban Wingert, she unveiled Duan Light Reservea chapel-like space in Montezuma, New Mexico, creates superior light effects using prisms built into the structure.
Over the years, Duane has separated the business into her holdings. Provided some works, including a copy of Di Maria lightning fieldof the Dia Art Foundation, which now shows many of the artists it has worked with, and its 2013 pledge to NGA includes approximately 250 works in the museum’s permanent collection on postwar art.
When NGA’s will was announced, interest in Duane erupted again, and a retrospective travel exhibition ensued, as did her autobiography and exhibition written by the late curator Germano Celante.
In a statement about the gift being pledged at the time, Meyer said, “Dwan was interested in new aesthetic forms and ideas. She was a patron as much as a salesman. Her gallery represents an alternative to today’s landscape, where it is primarily dominated by commercial values.”
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