Paula Cooper opened the first art gallery in what would later be called SoHo in October 1968, at 96 Prince Street; by 1975 the renamed neighbourhood held 83 more. The gallery moved to Chelsea in 1996, into a West 21st Street building she had bought the year before.
Chelsea’s gallery blocks are concentrated west of Tenth Avenue in the low 20s, so this sits within a few minutes’ walk of most of the others and is easy to fold into one afternoon.
Paula Cooper came to dealing sideways. She started at World House Galleries on Madison Avenue at twenty-one, ran the Paula Johnson Gallery from 1964 to 1966 — where Walter De Maria had his first New York solo show — and then worked at Park Place Gallery, the artists’ co-operative whose members included Mark di Suvero and Robert Grosvenor. By the time she opened under her own name she had already spent years inside two quite different models of how art gets shown.
The gallery she opened at 96 Prince Street in October 1968 announced its terms in its first exhibition, a benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam with proceeds split evenly between the artists and the committee. On the wall was Sol LeWitt’s first wall drawing, alongside work by Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Robert Ryman — a room that now reads as a summary of what Minimal and Conceptual art were about to become.
The space was also lent to things that made no money at all. From 1975 until 2000 the gallery gave over New Year’s Eve to a marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, carried through by whoever turned up; John Cage, Philip Glass and Meredith Monk read at various points, and at Cage’s suggestion the group swapped in Finnegans Wake in 1986 and again in 1988.
Cooper bought the West 21st Street building in 1995 and moved the gallery to Chelsea the following year, with Richard Gluckman handling the conversion; Michael Kimmelman described the main room as being like a big chapel, which is a fair account of the proportions and the quiet. Nearby construction pushed the gallery to a temporary space on West 26th Street in 2018. Entry is free and unattended in the usual way — walk in, look, leave when you are done.
534 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011 · Official site ↗
The Paula Cooper Gallery is an art gallery in New York City, founded in 1968 by Paula Cooper.
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