Paula Cooper at her gallery on Wooster Street, New York in 1983
Photo: Richard Leslie Schulman; courtesy of paula cooper gallery
In the 50 years since Paula Cooper opened her Soho, New York, gallery with a politically charged exhibition benefiting the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the art market has ballooned. “That was before contemporary art was ever sold at auction, so you can imagine how auction houses have affected the New York market today,” she says.
Indeed, last year alone Christies contemporary art department realised $1.6bn in sales, and at Sothebys, aggregate auction sales of contemporary art improved 29% from 2016 to 2017. Yet Coopers playbook, in which the rubric for success is building lasting relationships with artists and placing their work in significant and stable collections, remains the same.
“Its a totally different world, but there will always be originality and individualism and artists who are really working for their work,” Cooper says, optimistic that small-gallery grit can survive a multibillion-dollar market.
On 10 October, Paula Cooper Gallery celebrates its 50th anniversary with an exhibition that is a near facsimile of her 1968 inaugural show, with works from the original artists—including Sol LeWitt, Jo Baer and Donald Judd, and benefiting the charity March For Our Lives. It will take place at a temporary 26th Street space in Chelsea, a few blocks away from the gallerys previous home, which caught fire in July.
For Cooper, now 80, the anniversary is also a reminder of when galleries valued an artists success rather than their own profits. It is a nod to a time before the market faced an infiltration of global behemoths such as Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth, both of which have poached artists from Cooper.
“Its difficult when youve worked very hard for someone and finally they achieve great success, and then someone else comes along and boom, theyre gone,” says Cooper, who recently lost Charles Gaines to Hauser & Wirth. “Even though artists sometimes leave, Im still glad I was able to help them. I guess I see things a bit differently now,” she says.
