Virginia Dwan

Virginia Dwan (October 18, 1931 – September 5, 2022) was an American art collector, art patron, philanthropist, and founder of the Dwan Light Sanctuary in Montezuma, New Mexico. She was the owner and executive director of Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1959–1967) and Dwan Gallery New York (1965–1971), a contemporary art gallery closely identified with the American movements of minimalism, conceptualism, and land art.

Early life and education Virginia Dwan, heiress to the Minnesota-based conglomerate 3M, was born in Minneapolis. She attended the University of California at Los Angeles to study art, but then dropped out and married a medical student in Los Angeles.

In 1950, Dwan married psychology graduate student Paul Fischer, and gave birth to her daughter, Candace. She married UCLA medical student Vadim Philippe Kondratief in 1958. In its early years, Dwan Gallery showed some local artists, most notably Ed Kienholz, but, more significantly, it brought New York and European artists to Los Angeles, introducing them to the city and its artists.

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. which was twice as large as her first space. The building's renovation, which was designed by Morris Verger, a student of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, was inspired by the V.C. Morris store in San Francisco designed by the latter. Though "My Country 'Tis of Thee" focused on New York artists, it also included the work of Edward Kienholz. Another important exhibition included "Boxes" (1964), which featured box-shaped works by an international group of artists including Los Angeles sculptors Larry Bell, Tony Berlant, Edward Kienholz, Ron Miyashiro, and Ken Price.

In 1965, Dwan moved to Manhattan. She 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. and Ross's Star Axis, a naked eye observatory in New Mexico whose construction she supported from its conception in 1971. She also purchased the land for Michael Heizer's Double Negative.

Legacy In 1965, the Virginia Dwan Collection, featuring artists like Willem de Kooning (Untitled, 1961), Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Lee Bontecou, was exhibited at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dwan later gave many artworks to various museums in the United States. Already in 1969, she presented the Pasadena Art Museum (present day Norton Simon Museum) with L.H.O.O.Q. or La Joconde (1964) by Marcel Duchamp. In 1985, Dwan donated Michael Heizer's project Double Negative (1969), two 100-foot-long cuts facing each other across the curving rim of Mormon Mesa (Clark County, Nevada), to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). In 1996, she gave Heizer's Actual Size: Munich Rotary (1970), six projected photographic images, each wide and high, to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Dwan conceived and supported construction of the Dwan Light Sanctuary (1996), 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.

Other works were given to other museums, including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University; the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; and the Des Moines Art Center. In 2013, Dwan gave A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey (1968) by Robert Smithson, an indoor work containing substances from an outdoor site elsewhere; and Glass Stratum (1967) 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, D.C. The 250 artworks include paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs from the late 1950s through the 1970s.

Archives The Dwan Gallery Archives are held at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. and at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.