Virginia Dwan was an American art collector, art patron, philanthropist, and founder of the Dwan Light Sanctuary in Montezuma, New Mexico.
18 Facts About Virginia Dwan
2.
Virginia Dwan was the former owner and executive director of Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles and Dwan Gallery New York, a contemporary art gallery closely identified with the American movements of Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Earthworks.
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Virginia Dwan, heiress to the Minnesota-based conglomerate 3M, was born in Minneapolis.
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Virginia Dwan attended the University of California at Los Angeles to study art, but then dropped out and married a medical student in Los Angeles.
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In 1950, Dwan married psychology graduate student Peter Fischer, and one month after her 19th birthday, she gave birth to her daughter, Candace.
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Virginia Dwan married UCLA medical student Philippe Vadim Kondratief in 1958.
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Virginia Dwan leased a tiny storefront in a Spanish Mission-style building at 1091 Broxton Avenue in the Westwood section of Los Angeles in 1959.
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Virginia Dwan found a bigger space in 1962, hiring art dealer John Weber, who brought in a few of his own artists and organized some shows.
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In June 1962, Virginia Dwan moved to the new location at 10846 Lindbrook Drive, which was twice as large as her first space.
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Virginia Dwan organized several influential exhibitions in her new space, including "My Country 'Tis of Thee", an exhibition of Pop Art held in November 1962.
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Virginia Dwan opened a place on 57th Street, leaving Weber to run the gallery in Los Angeles for a few years before he joined her in New York.
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Virginia Dwan then began to focus on earthworks such as the 35-Pole Lightning Field by Walter De Maria and Ross's Star Axis, a naked eye observatory in New Mexico whose construction she supported from its conception in 1971.
13.
Virginia Dwan purchased the land for Michael Heizer's Double Negative.
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In 1965, the Virginia Dwan Collection, featuring artists like Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Lee Bontecou, was exhibited at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Virginia Dwan later gave many artworks to various museums in the United States.
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In 1985, Virginia Dwan donated Michael Heizer's project Double Negative, two 100-foot-long cuts facing each other across the curving rim of Mormon Mesa, to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
17.
Virginia Dwan conceived and supported construction of the Virginia Dwan Light Sanctuary, a structural artwork and secular space in Montezuma, New Mexico built in collaboration with architect Laban Wingert and Charles Ross, who contributed the space's solar spectrum artwork.
18.
In 2013, Virginia Dwan gave A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey by Robert Smithson, an indoor work containing substances from an outdoor site elsewhere; and Glass Stratum by Timothy McCormack, made up of 37 sheets of half-inch-thick glass layered atop one another, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.