The Claire S. Copley Gallery was an
art gallery
An art gallery is a room or a building in which visual art is displayed. In Western cultures from the mid-15th century, a gallery was any long, narrow covered passage along a wall, first used in the sense of a place for art in the 1590s. The long ...
that existed from 1973 to 1977 on
La Cienega Boulevard
La Cienega Boulevard is a major north–south arterial road in the Los Angeles metropolitan area that runs from the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood in the north to El Segundo Boulevard in Hawthorne in the south. It was named for Rancho Las ...
in Los Angeles, California, U.S.. Together with the galleries of
Eugenia Butler, Rolf Nelson, Nick Wilder, and
Riko Mizuno, the Claire Copley Gallery played an important role in the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s and 1970s. The gallery provided a venue for emerging American and European minimalist and Conceptual artists, among them
Bas Jan Ader
Bastiaan Johan Christiaan "Bas Jan" Ader (19 April 1942 – disappeared 1975) was a Dutch conceptual and performance artist, and photographer. His work was in many instances presented as photographs and film of his performances. He made perf ...
,
Terry Allen,
Michael Asher,
Daniel Buren
Daniel Buren (born 25 March 1938, in Boulogne-Billancourt) is a French conceptual artist, painter, and sculptor. He has won numerous awards including the Golden Lion for best pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1986), the International Award for ...
,
Jan Dibbets
Jan Dibbets (born 9 May 1941, in Weert) is an Amsterdam-based Dutch conceptual artist. His work is influenced by mathematics and works mainly with photography.
Life and career
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he started as an art teacher at ...
,
Ger Van Elk,
On Kawara
was a Japanese conceptual artist who lived in SoHo, New York City, from 1965 until his death. He took part in many solo and group Art exhibition, exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1976.
Early life
Kawara was born in Kariya, Japan on ...
,
Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth (; born January 31, 1945) is a Hungarian-American conceptual artist, who lives in New York and Venice, ,
David Lamelas,
William Leavitt,
Allan McCollum
Allan McCollum (born 4 August 1944) is a contemporary American artist who lives and works in New York City. In 1975, his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, and he moved to New York City the same year. In the late 1970s, he became especial ...
,
Allen Ruppersberg
Allen Ruppersberg (born 1944) is an American conceptual artist based in Los Angeles and New York City.
He is one of the first generation of American conceptual artists that changed the way art was thought about and made. His work includes p ...
, and
William Wegman.
History
The Claire S. Copley Gallery was featured along with two other women-owned galleries (those of Eugenia Butler and Riko Mizuno) in a 2011 exhibition at the
Crossroads School's Sam Francis Gallery, part of the
Pacific Standard Time
The Pacific Time Zone (PT) is a time zone encompassing parts of western Canada, the western United States, and western Mexico. Places in this zone observe standard time by subtracting eight hours from Coordinated Universal Time ( UTC−08:00). ...
collaborative initiative organized by the
Getty and featuring Los Angeles art from 1945-1980.
Copley's invitation to Michael Asher to launch his first American solo show in her space resulted in the work that the gallery may be best known for, the 1974 Installation where Asher removed the separating wall between the exhibition space and the back room storage and office areas. In addition, Asher intentionally left the walls of the gallery itself completely blank. According to Asher, "The idea was to integrate the two areas, so that the office area and its activities could be viewed from the exhibition area, and the exhibition area opened to the gallery directors' view." By exposing the gallery owner to viewers and viewers to the owner and without any additional art on display, Asher deliberately brought forth the usually hidden relationships existing between them.
By championing artists like Asher, Copley and other gallery owners at the time sought to challenge the reign of market forces by exhibiting works that couldn't be bought or sold. This stance in no small part led to the closing of the Copley Gallery after only a few years and to Copley's founding, along with Morgan Thomas and Connie Lewallen, of the non-profit
Foundation for Art Resources, a non-profit organization dedicated to exhibiting unconventional work in public spaces.
References
{{reflist
External links
She Accepts the Proposition: Women Gallerists and the Redefinition of Art in Los Angeles, 1967-1978Claire S. Copley Gallery from Pacific Standard Time Archive
*
History Lesson: A View from Here from 2008, FAR: Foundation for Art Resources
* Getty Museum, Claire Copley Gallery records
Defunct art museums and galleries in California
Art museums and galleries in Los Angeles
Art museums and galleries established in 1973