Search results for ""author virginia dwan""

Known primarily for her visionary art collecting, Virginia Dwan (born 1931) showed artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, Joan Mitchell and more at her Los Angeles gallery in the 1960s. But Dwan has her own artistic practice, and has dedicated the last three and a half years to documenting military graves in cemeteries across the United States. This collection of photographs, accompanying an exhibition that will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the LACMA in Los Angeles, serves as striking evidence of the ever-growing number of lives lost as a consequence of war. Though the work is political, the volume is purely visual, without comment—just page after page of headstones. The only text in the book is the late Pete Seeger’s question, “Where have all the flowers gone?” The images speak for themselves.

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Virginia Dwan is one of the most influential figures in the history of twentieth-century American art. Her eponymously named galleries, the first established in a Los Angeles storefront in 1959, followed by a second in New York in 1965, became a beacon for influential postwar American and European artists. She sponsored the debut show for Yves Klein in the United States, and she championed such artists as Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Sol LeWitt, and Ad Reinhardt. Her Los Angeles gallery featured abstract expressionism, neo-dada, and pop, while the New York branch became associated with the emerging movements of minimalism and conceptualism. At the same time, the gallery's influence expanded to remote locations in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, where Dwan sponsored such iconic earthworks as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer's Double Negative, and Walter De Maria's Lightning Field. Though Dwan was a major force in the art world of the sixties and seventies, her story and the history of her gallery have been largely unexplored until now. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art celebrating Dwan's gift to the Gallery of her extraordinary personal collection, From Los Angeles to New York: The Dwan Gallery, 1959 1971 explores her remarkable career. Alongside lush full-color images of one hundred leading artworks, the book deepens our understanding of the artistic exchanges Dwan facilitated during this 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. James Meyer, the curator of the exhibition and the foremost authority on minimal art, contributes a essay that is a sophisticated and broad-ranging analysis of Dawn's legacy. Honoring Dwan's significant influence and impact on postwar art, From Los Angeles to New York is a rich and informative collection that will be treasured by fans of contemporary art.

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