The Paula Cooper Gallery opened in 1968, the first art gallery to open in New York’s SoHo district, with an exhibition to benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The show included works by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Mangold, and Robert Ryman, among others, as well as Sol LeWitt’s first wall drawing. For almost 40 years, the gallery’s artistic agenda has remained focused on, though not limited to, Conceptual and Minimal Art.
Many shows of historical importance have been organized by the gallery. The first exhibition of Jennifer Bartlett’s Rhapsody opened in 1976. Throughout the 1970s, the gallery presented the work of then-unknown artists Lynda Benglis, Elizabeth Murray, Joel Shapiro, and Jackie Winsor. From the mid-1970s on, Jonathan Borofsky presented his Neo-Expressionist installation shows, complete with scattered photocopies, flashing lights, music, or ping-pong tables. Among several Robert Gober exhibitions was a groundbreaking show on gender and identity in 1989. In 1996, the gallery presented an exhibition of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by Yayoi Kusama from the 1950s and 1960s, and in 1999, the work of Dutch artist Jan Schoonhoven, the late artist’s first one-person exhibition in New York.
More recent exhibitions of note include Sophie Calle’s Double Game (2001), organized around her collaboration with writer Paul Auster; Video Quartet, Christian Marclay’s highly celebrated visual and musical collage of Hollywood film excerpts (2002); several large-scale Mark di Suvero sculpture exhibitions (2002, 2003, and 2006); an exhibition of white fluorescent light works by Dan Flavin (2003); Images à la Carte, an exhibition of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen food drawings, accompanied by a hardbound, full-color catalogue (2004); a landmark exhibition by Rudolf Stingel comprising a gallery-wide white floor installation and a large-scale photo-realist portrait of Paula Cooper (2005); and one-person exhibitions by artists Atsuko Tanaka (2004), Hans Haacke (2005), and Sam Durant (2005).
In 1996, the gallery moved to Chelsea to occupy an award-winning 19th-century building redesigned by Richard Gluckman, of Gluckman Mayner Architects. In 1999, Paula Cooper opened a second exhibition space, also on 21st Street.
The gallery established its own recording label, Dog w/a Bone, in 2000. To date, Dog w/a Bone has released five recordings, featuring music by Morton Feldman, Petr Kotik and the S.E.M. Ensemble, and Marcel Duchamp’s complete musical work. Spoken Music, a recording of a concert held in the gallery featuring works by John Cage, Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, and Anne Tardos, was released in early 2003.
Beyond its immediate artistic program, the gallery has regularly hosted concerts, music symposia, dance performances, book receptions, poetry readings, as well as art exhibitions and special events to benefit various national and community organizations. For 25 years, until 2000, the gallery presented a much-celebrated series of New Year’s Eve readings of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
In May 2003, Paula Cooper and her husband Jack Macrae opened 192 Books (www.192books.com), an independent bookstore featuring key works of literature and history, art and criticism, the social and natural sciences, travel and children's books. Please check the site for a detailed schedule of upcoming readings and events.
