The Paula Cooper Gallery is 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 ...

in New York City, founded in 1968 by .

History

Predecessors

Cooper ran her own space, the Paula Johnson Gallery, from 1964 to 1966, where

Walter De Maria Walter Joseph De MariaRoberta Smith (July 26, 2013)Walter De Maria, Artist on Grand Scale, Dies at 77 ''New York Times''. (October 1, 1935July 25, 2013) was an American artist, sculptor, illustrator and composer, who lived and worked in New Yor ...

launched his first solo show in New York. She worked for

Park Place Gallery The Park Place Gallery was a contemporary cooperative art gallery, in operation from 1963 to 1967, and was located in New York City. The Park Place Gallery was a notable as a post-World War II gallery for both its location and that it supported a ...

from 1965 to 1967, a co-operative gallery of five painters and five sculptors, including Mark di Suvero, Leo Valledor, Robert Grosvenor, and David Novros.Gareth Harris (November 30, 2018)
Dealer Paula Cooper on 50 years in the New York art world
''

Financial Times The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and also published digitally that focuses on business and economic Current affairs (news format), current affairs. Based in London, the paper is owned by a Jap ...

''.

1968–1975

According to ''

The New York Observer ''The New York Observer'' was a weekly newspaper established in 1987. In 2016, it ceased print publication and became the online-only newspaper ''Observer''. The media site focuses on culture, real estate, media, politics and the entertainment ...

'': "The history of Paula Cooper Gallery is, in many ways, the history of the New York art world." Cooper opened the first gallery at 96 Prince Street with $4,400 in October 1968. “I didn’t like uptown,” Ms. Cooper told ''The Observer''. “I thought it was just little shops. I looked downtown. And people told me that I was crazy to open there. That no one would go there.” The gallery opened with an exhibition to benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, working alongside Veterans Against the War; proceeds of sales were split 50-50 between the artists and the committee.Gareth Harris (November 30, 2018)
Dealer Paula Cooper on 50 years in the New York art world
''

''. The exhibition featured LeWitt’s first wall drawing, and included works by Carl Andre,

Jo Baer Josephine Gail Baer (née Kleinberg; August 7, 1929 – January 21, 2025) was an American painter associated with minimalist art. She began exhibiting her work at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and other venues for contemporary art in the mid- ...

Dan Flavin Dan Flavin (April 1, 1933 – November 29, 1996) was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures. Early life and career Daniel Nicholas Flavi ...

, Donald Judd, and Robert Ryman. That show is now widely recognized as seminal in the development of a new generation of rigorous and challenging work. By 1975, the neighborhood had been renamed

SoHo SoHo, short for "South of Houston Street, Houston Street", is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, art installations such as The Wall ...

, and included 83 other art galleries.Michael H. Miller, "Clock Stopper: Paula Cooper Opened the First Art Gallery in SoHo and Hasn’t Slowed Down Since," ''The New York Observer'', September 13, 2011.

1996–today

Cooper bought a building at 534 West 21st Street in 1995, and subsequently relocated the gallery to Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood in 1996. The initial round of renovations was overseen by the architect Richard Gluckman. Critic

Michael Kimmelman Michael Kimmelman (born May 8, 1958) is the Architecture criticism, architecture critic for ''The New York Times'' and has written about public housing and homelessness, public space, landscape architecture, community development and equity, infr ...

, reviewing a Carl Andre exhibition, wrote in ''The New York Times'': "The news here is how good Paula Cooper's new gallery looks: the main room is like a big chapel. Too bad for SoHo, which Ms. Cooper, one of its pioneering dealers, recently abandoned to the hordes of retail stores." In 2007, Paula Cooper gave the extant records of Park Place, dating from 1966 to 1967, and the early records of the Paula Cooper Gallery, from 1968 to 1973 to the Smithsonian

Archives of American Art The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 20 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washing ...

. In 2013, Paula Cooper Gallery opened two pop-up spaces, in a former auto parts shop at 197 10th Avenue, near 22nd Street, as well as on the ground floor of 521 West 21st Street. In 2018, the gallery temporarily moved its headquarters to a 9,000-square-foot space located at 524 West 26th Street due to construction in an adjacent building. In 2021, Paula Cooper Gallery opened a space in

Palm Beach, Florida Palm Beach is an incorporated town in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. Located on a barrier island in east-central Palm Beach County, the town is separated from West Palm Beach, Florida, West Palm Beach and Lake Worth Beach, Florida, ...

''The Clock'' (2011)

In February 2011,

Christian Marclay Christian Marclay (born January 11, 1955) is a visual artist and composer. He holds both American and Swiss nationality. Marclay's work explores connections between sound art, noise music, photography, video art, film and digital animations. A p ...

's twenty-four-hour multi-visual exhibit ''The Clock'' was exhibited in the gallery space. ''The Clock'' had recently received the

Golden Lion The Golden Lion () is the highest prize given to a film at the Venice Film Festival. The prize was introduced in 1949 by the organizing committee and is regarded as one of the film industry's most prestigious and distinguished prizes. In 1970, a ...

award at the 54th

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale ( ; ) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy. There are two main components of the festival, known as the Art Biennale () and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Architecture Biennale (), ...

. Art critic

Roberta Smith Roberta Smith (born 1948) is co-chief art critic of ''The New York Times'' and a lecturer on contemporary art. She is the first woman to hold that position at the Times. Education and early life Born in 1948 in New York City and raised in Lawre ...

wrote in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'': "It is ensconced in a theaterlike installation at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, where it should not be missed...The presentation at the Paula Cooper gallery reiterates the synthetic nature of ''The Clock''. The combination of carpeted floors, walls hung with velvet curtains and a dozen long couches lined up in four rows, with the screen high and large on the wall, evocatively conflates living room, screening room and movie theater, while even hinting at drive-in movies (the couches as parked cars)." In ''

'', Michael H. Miller wrote: "

hen Hen commonly refers to a female animal: a female chicken, other gallinaceous bird, any type of bird in general, or a lobster. It is also a slang term for a woman. Hen, HEN or Hens may also refer to: Places Norway *Hen, Buskerud, a village in R ...

Ms. Cooper exhibited Christian Marclay’s 24-hour paean to cinematic history, ''The Clock'', for several weekends, the gallery stayed open 24/7 and a line stretched around the corner into the early hours of morning...Models mingled with art handlers. Reporters and rival dealers waited patiently amongst the late-night swell of people."

Artists

The gallery is primarily known for the

Minimalist In visual arts, music, and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in the post-war era in western art. The movement is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and modernism; it anticipated contemporary post-mi ...

and Conceptual artists it has represented and whose careers it helped launch, including: In addition to living artists, Paula Cooper Gallery also handles the estates of the following: Paula Cooper Gallery has in the past represented the following:

Recognition

In 2015, Paula Cooper was awarded France’s

Order of Arts and Letters The Order of Arts and Letters () is an order of France established on 2 May 1957 by the Minister of Culture. Its supplementary status to the was confirmed by President Charles de Gaulle in 1963. Its purpose is the recognition of significant ...

, the country’s highest distinction for contributions to French arts and culture.

References

External links

Official websitePaula Johnson Gallery, Park Place, and Paula Cooper Gallery archives at the Archives of American ArtThe New York Observer profile of Paula Cooper GalleryInterview Magazine: ''Paula Cooper''
by Matthew Higgs (August 2, 2012)
San Francisco Art Quarterly: ''Paula Cooper: In Conversation with Constance Lewallen'' (November 2012–January 2013)
{{Authority control Contemporary art galleries in the United States 1968 establishments in New York City Art museums and galleries in Manhattan Art museums and galleries established in 1968