Helene Winer (born 1946) is an American art gallery owner and curator. She co-owned

Metro Pictures Gallery Metro Pictures was a New York City art gallery founded in 1980 by Janelle Reiring (previously of Leo Castelli Gallery), and Helene Winer (previously of Artists Space). It was located in SoHo until 1995 when it moved to Chelsea, Manhattan, Chelsea. ...

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

with Janelle Reiring. Metro Pictures closed in late 2021. Her career deeply involved the

postmodern art Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia, ...

ists of the 1970s and 1980s known as

the Pictures Generation ''The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984'' was an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York City that ran from April 29 – August 2, 2009. The exhibition took its name from ''Pictures'', a 1977 five person group show organ ...

. She lives in

Tribeca Tribeca ( ), originally written as TriBeCa, is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Its name is a syllabic abbreviation of "Triangle Below Canal Street". The "triangle" (more accurately a quadrilateral) is bounded by Canal Str ...

Early life and education

Born in 1946 in Los Angeles, Winer was raised in Westchester and received a B.A. in Art History from the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in ...

in 1966. She started as an assistant at the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 1961 ...

before travelling to Europe, where she took the position of assistant director of the

Whitechapel Gallery The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery in Whitechapel on the north side of Whitechapel High Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The original building, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, opened in 1901 as one of the fi ...

Pomona College Museum of Art

In late 1970, Winer returned to Southern California, where she was appointed as Director of the Museum of Art at

Pomona College Pomona College ( ) is a private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Claremont, California. It was established in 1887 by a group of Congregationalism in the United States, Congregationalists ...

, and as an assistant professor of art. At Pomona, Winer organized the first solo shows of

Jack Goldstein Jack Goldstein (September 27, 1945 – March 14, 2003) was a Canadian born, California and New York-based performance and conceptual artist turned post-conceptual painter in the 1980s. Early life and education Goldstein was born to a Jewish ...

and William Wegman, as well as exhibitions of

John Baldessari John Anthony Baldessari (June 17, 1931 – January 2, 2020) was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California. Initially a paint ...

Joe Goode Joe Goode (né Jose Bueno; March 23, 1937 – March 22, 2025) was an American visual artist, known for his pop art paintings. Goode made a name for himself in Los Angeles, California, through his cloud imagery and milk bottle paintings which we ...

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 ...

, John McCracken, Ed Moses,

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

Ger van Elk Ger van Elk (9 March 1941 – 17 August 2014) was a Dutch artist who created sculptures, painted photographs, installations and film. His work has been described as being both conceptual art and arte povera. Between 1959 and 1988 he lived and wor ...

. She also organized sometimes-controversial presentations for performance artists

Chris Burden Christopher Lee Burden (April 11, 1946 – May 10, 2015) was an American artist working in performance art, sculpture, and installation art. Burden became known in the 1970s for his performance art works, including ''Shoot (Burden), Shoot'' (1971) ...

, Hirokazu Kosaka, Wolfgang Stoerchle, and

John M. White John M. White (born May 10, 1937) is an American performance artist, sculptor, and painter. He is a significant figure in the development of California performance art in the 1960s. Early years Born in San Francisco, California, White entered ...

Artists Space

After leaving Pomona, Winer spent a brief period writing for the ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...

'', before moving to New York and freelancing before becoming Director of the non-profit

Artists Space Artists Space is a non-profit art gallery and arts organization first established at 155 Wooster Street in SoHo, Manhattan, New York City. Founded in 1972 by Irving Sandler and Trudie Grace and funded by the New York State Council on the Arts ...

in 1975. The 1977 show ''Pictures'', curated by

Douglas Crimp John Douglas Crimp (August 19, 1944 July 5, 2019) was an American art historian, critic, curator, and AIDS activist. He was known for his scholarly contributions to the fields of postmodern theories and art, institutional critique, dance, film, ...

, featured the early work of

Troy Brauntuch Troy Brauntuch (born 1954 in Jersey City, New Jersey) is an American artist known for his association with the Pictures Generation, a group of artists who came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s exploring the relationship between images, media, ...

Sherrie Levine Sherrie Levine (born 1947) is an American photographer, painter, and conceptual artist. Some of her work consists of exact photographic reproductions of the work of other photographers such as Walker Evans, Eliot Porter and Edward Weston. Ea ...

Robert Longo Robert Longo (born January 7, 1953) is an American artist, filmmaker, photographer and musician. Longo became first well known in the 1980s for his ''Men in the Cities'' drawing and print series, which depict sharply dressed men and women writ ...

, and Philip Smith. ''Pictures'' turned out to be a seminal exhibition for that group of emerging postmodern artists, who later came to be known as the Pictures Generation, whom Winer's influence helped shape and bring together.

Metro Pictures

Winer left Artists Space and joined with Reiring, formerly of the Castelli Gallery, to open

Metro Pictures Metro Pictures Corporation was a Film, motion picture production company founded in early 1915 in Jacksonville, Florida. It was a forerunner of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The company produced its films in New York, Los Angeles, and sometimes at le ...

in 1980. The opening group exhibition featured works from Pictures Generation artists Brauntuch, Goldstein, Levine, Longo,

Richard Prince Richard Prince (born August 6, 1949) is an American painter and photographer. In the mid-1970s, Prince made drawings and painterly collages that he has since disowned. His image ''Untitled (Cowboy)'', a photographic reproduction of a photograph ...

Cindy Sherman Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. Her breakthrough work is often co ...

, and

James Welling James Welling (born 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut) is an American artist, photographer and educator living in New York City. He attended Carnegie-Mellon University where he studied drawing with Gandy Brodie and at the University of Pittsburgh where ...

. Subsequent individual exhibitions that followed marked the first major exhibitions for these artists in New York. In the years that followed, new artists have joined the gallery and continued to present new and varied conceptual works, including

Olaf Breuning Olaf Breuning (born February 16, 1970)SIK ISEAOlaf Breuning/ref> is a Swiss-born artist, born in Schaffhausen, who lives in New York City. Works *''Home 1/Home 2'' (2004/7) 30 minute video starring Brian Kerstetter. ''Home 1'' is presented as ...

, André Butzer, Andy Hope 1930, Gary Simmons, Andrea Slominski,

Isaac Julien Sir Isaac Julien (born 21 February 1960Annette Kuhn"Julien, Isaac (1960–)" BFI Screen Online.) is a British installation artist, filmmaker, and Distinguished Professor of the Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Early life Juli ...

, Claire Fontaine, David Malkjovic,

Paulina Olowska Paulina Olowska (born 1976, Gdańsk) is a Polish painter and photographer, who also works in the field of performance and video-art, social action and applied art. The areas of her artistic explorations are modernist utopias and research on the w ...

Trevor Paglen Trevor Paglen (born 1974) is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work covers mass surveillance and data collection. In 2016, Paglen won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and he has also won The Cultural Award from the ...

, Catherine Sullivan,

Sara VanDerBeek Sara VanDerBeek (born 1976), is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. She is known for photographing sculptures and three-dimensional still-life assemblages of her own making, some of which she destroys after the photos have be ...

Tris Vonna-Michell Tris Vonna-Michell (born 1982) is a British artist who performs narratives and constructs installations through the layering of these narratives, photographs and mementos, presented using antiquated technologies and slide projection. Vonna-Michel ...

, B. Wurtz, Camille Henrot, and Nina Beier. The gallery closed in late 2021.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Winer, Helene 1946 births American art curators Living people American art dealers Women art dealers Pomona College faculty American women curators