Gavin Brown Donates Gallery Archive to Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies

Longtime New York gallerist Gavin Brown has given his archive to Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard). Brown, a partner at Gladstone Gallery, amassed the trove during the twenty-six years he ran Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, which he opened in 1994 andclosedin 2020. Among the materials included are catalogues, gallery documents, and files on the artists whose work Brown showed over the years, many of whom he brought to Gladstone with him when he shuttered his own operation. Among the high-profile names whose work he exhibited at his own gallery are LaToya Ruby Frazier, Arthur Jafa, Alex Katz, Joan Jonas, Mark Leckey, Elizabeth Peyton, Sturtevant, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

“Gavin Brown’s Enterprise was as much a social space as an influential pillar of the commercial gallery world, and it remains a key touchstone for independent representation within the arts community,” said CCS Bard executive director Tom Eccles in a statement. “The archives preserve and make public a dynamic history of a space known for challenging convention and for dynamic exhibition making.”

Many objects from the archive will be on view at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art in the exhibition “Start Making Sense,” set to run June 22 through October 20. The show, which draws entirely from Bard’s collection, will explore the ways in which gallerists, curators, and artists have imbued art with meaning, primarily from the 1990s on. Among the artists whose work will be featured are Ida Applebroog, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Lyle Ashton Harris, Mary Heilmann, Chris Ofili, Catherine Opie, Laura Owens, Tiravanija, and Christopher Wool.

Besides Brown, several other leading art-world figures have donated their archives to CCS Bard, including art historian Eddie Chambers, bleeding-edge downtown dealers Colin de Land and Pat Hearn, and Robert Storr, a longtime curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and onetime dean of the Yale School of Art.