She Wanted Adventure: Art, Protest, and the Gallerists Who Made the Counterculture, (Hardcover)

<p><b>The untold story of five women gallerists whose risky and raucous exhibitions brought art to life and to Los Angeles from the 1960s onward--and whose influence transformed the city and remade the canon.</b> </p><p> A Volkswagen microbus sighs to a halt and out tumble nine people. It is 1962, and the passengers--artists, dancers, musicians, eccentrics--are haggard and harried from weeks on the road. They range from the already famous (Merce Cunningham, John Cage) to the soon-to-be (Robert Rauschenberg), and their arrival sets off a series of events that will change Los Angeles and the history of modern art forever. </p><p>Who invited them? That would be Virginia Dwan: heiress to a sandpaper fortune, art-school dropout, regal, restrained, twice divorced, and barely thirty years old. Her namesake gallery in Westwood would host the van dwellers and, in the years that followed, serve as a haven and a laboratory for risk-taking, era-defining exhibitions, antiwar activism, and raucous cultural experimentation. </p><p>Doubly invisible as both a curator and a woman, Dwan and her story have remained largely untold. She wasn't the only one. This is the tale of Dwan and four other women--Eugenia Butler, Riko Mizuno, Suzanne Jackson, and Claire Copley--whose lives converged and collided alongside the rise of the counterculture. Some had money; some did not. All bucked convention to open their own galleries in a time of radical change, a time defined by possibility and paranoia--emptying their bank accounts, escaping from their families, breaking up their marriages, and sometimes breaking the law. </p><p>In <i>She Wanted Adventure</i>, Catherine Wagley brings to light the strange, full, obsessive, private, and wonderful lives and works of these women--for whom art was not just a way of living but life itself.</p>

• She Wanted Adventure: Art, Protest, and the Gallerists Who Made the Counterculture, (Hardcover)
• Author: Catherine Wagley
• ISBN: 9780374613747
• Format: Hardcover
• Publication Date: 2027-06-22
• Page Count: 368